Ian Paisley: I thank the right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) for their remarks. I am grateful to them and to the House for its reception of me this day.
	I remind the Minister that the general and the two witnessing clerics put it firmly on the record that the arms that they saw decommissioned were largely old arms. The priest who was there said, "If you put them to your chest and pulled the trigger, they might kill you." That is a serious statement, which was added to: the real modern weapons formed a tiny percentage of the arms. Does that not worry the Secretary of State? We know that the IRA has modern weaponry, which needs to be put away. It is essential that that is done.

Peter Hain: The most recently published information is set out in the seventh Independent Monitoring Commission report, which shows that shooting and assaults by paramilitaries are at a historic low. Even that low rate remains unacceptable, however, and the Government condemn all such attacks unreservedly.

Derek Wyatt: Given the number of computer scientists, biotechnologists and MBA graduates, and the quality of those students, coming out of China and India, what assessments have we made of their systems and of whether we should implement any of their institutions here?

Geoff Hoon: I thought that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Skills put the Government's position extremely well yesterday.—[Interruption.] I am sorry that Opposition Members are scoffing at the vital issue of education for our children. This is what the Secretary of State said—Opposition Members should listen to it, and take note:
	"Every child matters, and children have only one chance of a good school education. Our ambition is for every child to get that chance and to develop their talents".—[Official Report, 25 October 2005; Vol. 438, c.169.)
	While Labour is committed to improving every child's opportunity, it is clear from the observations of the hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), and indeed from every contribution from Conservative Members, that Conservative Members are only concerned about protecting the rights of the privileged few.

Khalid Mahmood: Will my right hon. Friend join me in expressing regret for the loss of life that resulted from the tragic events in my constituency at the weekend? Will he join me in paying tribute to the emergency services, particularly the police, one of whom was shot? Luckily he survived, and is recovering in hospital. Will he also pay tribute to all the members of the community who have not been easily taken in by a small criminal element who want to divide the community, but have not succeeded? Will he ensure that those people are supported, so that our communities in Birmingham, including those in my constituency, stay together? What those communities need is unity and consistency.

David Heath: It is now three months since the horrific attacks on the London underground. Can the Leader of the House tell us what practical action has been taken to make the British transport system safer?

Adrian Sanders: The Leader of the House twice said earlier that the Government are concerned with the majority and not with the privileged few. So will they make it their policy to ensure that future test matches involving England are available on free-to-air TV channels, and not just to the privileged few who can afford pay-per-view?

Geoff Hoon: I have not seen the hon. Gentleman in the House of Commons gym at 7.15 am, but I look forward to doing so the next time that I am there. Quite a few of my Front-Bench colleagues use that gym: we set a very good example and do not just talk about staying fit. Incidentally, Jamie Oliver has paid tribute to the Government for their efforts to promote better food in schools.

Susan Kramer: North Kingston is part of my constituency, and people who live there have long wanted a local, non-selective secondary school in their community. They have been denied by Treasury rules, because there are surplus places in schools an hour away. After yesterday's announcement and White Paper, they have been calling me because they are completely confused. Can they can have their school, and will the Treasury supply the money?

Geoff Hoon: Certainly the Warwick agreement has carried through a number of initiatives that we have worked on in partnership with trade unions, but may I emphasise to my hon. Friend that the Warwick agreement is a two-sided process? It is important that both parties carry it through.

Margaret Beckett: On Friday, my Department announced that we had identified a case of highly pathogenic avian influenza in birds held in quarantine. After further analysis by the Veterinary Laboratories Agency, we announced on Sunday that the virus was H5N1. We now consider that the virus was found in samples taken from two birds—one Pionus parrot and one Mesia. The closest match is a strain identified in ducks in China earlier this year.
	There has been no reported occurrence of highly pathogenic avian influenza in the United Kingdom since 1992. The premises in which this event occurred contained two consignments of exotic birds from Surinam and Taiwan. At this stage, we cannot say for sure where the virus originated, but our working hypothesis, taking account of the identification of the particular strain, is that the virus is most likely to have come via Taiwan. However, it is important to keep an open mind about other possible sources and we are doing exactly that.
	As the House knows, the birds in the quarantine premises were culled by officers from the local animal health office on Friday evening. All those at the premises who may have come into contact with diseased birds were given antiviral treatment to protect them against risk of infection.
	Since Friday, we have been investigating the sequence of events that led to the death of the birds. As we announced on Sunday, some birds had already died in quarantine before 16 October. Thirty-two of those birds were being held in a freezer. Initial tests, which have not yet been validated, identified that H5 is present in some of those birds. We have not yet established the full circumstances of those deaths. However, our standard instructions on deaths in quarantine state:
	"When birds die during quarantine, their carcases must be placed by quarantine staff in a fridge or freezer until the Local Veterinary Inspector can collect them for transmission to the Veterinary Laboratories Agency."
	That is, of course, where the tests are carried out.
	Our investigations will continue and we will of course bring our findings to the attention of the House as early as possible. Meanwhile, we are taking certain prudent steps to ensure that our protection against avian influenza is as secure as possible. First, I want to underline the fact that this incident has demonstrated both the threat posed by avian influenza and the controls that we have in place to meet that threat. The quarantine system provided the protection that it is intended to deliver. That is not a reason for complacency, but it is right that we should recognise the swift and effective action that was taken once the disease had been identified. It also means that our disease-free status on avian flu remains unaffected.
	The incident took place against a background of increasing reported outbreaks of avian influenza in wild birds. Since July, we have seen outbreaks first in an area of Russia and then in Romania and Turkey. There have been other confirmed and suspected cases in some of those countries and in Croatia. We are taking those developments very seriously, but I should perhaps stress that they are not in themselves a cause for undue alarm. Avian flu does not at present transmit easily to humans. But there is concern about the potential for avian influenza viruses to mutate into new forms that might directly affect humans.
	Such transmission has not yet happened and indeed may never happen, but there is good reason to be very vigilant against the establishment of avian flu. I stress that avian flu is a disease of birds and that we receive a number of reports of suspected cases in any normal year, and for the obvious reason that people are being particularly cautious, we have received more than normal this year.
	Moreover, we in the UK and more generally in the European Union have worked to establish a good level of preparedness. Our contingency plan for avian flu was laid before Parliament in July. We regularly exercise the contingency arrangements nationally and locally, and our recent experience of managing a Newcastle disease outbreak demonstrated the fundamental soundness of those arrangements for dealing with a disease outbreak in birds, but we will continue to build on that good level of preparedness.
	In response to the specific incident that has occurred in quarantine, we issued instructions to the state veterinary service at the weekend that releases of birds from quarantine should now be subject to a case-by-case risk assessment. We understand that there are about 15 consignments of birds currently in quarantine. Each of those will be subjected to an individual veterinary risk assessment and referred to DEFRA headquarters before any decision to release is authorised.
	At the weekend, the chief veterinary officer and I ordered that a general review of our quarantine arrangements and procedures be undertaken. Pending the outcome of that review, we have called on the European Commission to propose an immediate temporary ban on imports of live birds into the EU while we collectively assess the risk that they pose. I am pleased to say that the Commission responded very positively to that call, and a ban lasting until 30 November was agreed in the relevant EU Standing Committee yesterday.
	At the same time, we are especially mindful of the potential threat posed by illegal imports. My Department already works closely with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs on the control of illegal imports of animals and animal products, and I have asked my officials immediately to address how we can increase our vigilance against the specific issue of illegal imports of live birds. The Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Jim Knight), who has responsibility for rural affairs, landscape and biodiversity, will also take up the issue of illegal trade at an EU wildlife trade enforcement event tomorrow.
	We were already working actively with the Commission and other member states to tackle the wider threat of the introduction of avian influenza by migrating wildfowl and other routes. As a result of that work, I expect to bring before the House within the coming days sensible and measured regulations that will assist us in reducing the risk of disease and strengthening our ability to control an outbreak. Those regulations will implement the announcement that we made last week about establishing a register of all commercial poultry producers in the country. As we said then, we shall start that process of registration next month.
	For non-commercial poultry keepers, we have produced a simple, clear and, I hope, effective guide to biosecurity, and we are actively distributing that guide through lobby groups, veterinary networks, hobby magazines and other available channels. We have also decided, with fellow member states, that in the present circumstances, it is desirable to prohibit bird fairs, markets and shows, except where a risk assessment shows that they can be safely conducted. We are in full discussion of that proposal with potentially affected stakeholders.
	Ornithological groups are also very important stakeholders for us, and earlier this month, we reached an agreement with them jointly to monitor wild birds. That is, of course, in addition to our existing annual programme of monitoring domestic poultry for avian influenza that is already under way.
	The regulations that we will bring before Parliament will give legal effect to the provisions in recent legislation that enable us to instruct poultry keepers to keep their birds indoors, and we are urgently discussing that provision with stakeholders.
	In conclusion, I recognise that the public are rightly concerned about avian flu. I am pleased that our quarantine rules worked to identify and eradicate the immediate risk in this particular incident, but because we are not complacent, we are taking the steps that I have indicated both to review and strengthen our protection against legal and illegal imports of captive wild birds, and in the next few days, we will bring forward the new regulations that I have described.

Oliver Letwin: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for making available an early copy of her statement and for the technical briefing that her officials provided us with yesterday. I welcome unreservedly the ban on commercial live bird imports that she has announced today, but I have some questions about the past and some questions about the future. I shall start with the past.
	First, why did the Secretary of State and her Ministers for six months strenuously resist EU proposals to impose a ban on commercial wild bird imports? Secondly, in her statement she admitted that despite press briefings over the weekend she does not currently know whether the infected bird was a parrot, whether it came from Surinam or whether it was infected by a bird from Taiwan. This is horribly reminiscent of the confusion over sheep and cattle material for which she apologised to the House in 2001. Can she explain how she and her Ministers have for many months presided over quarantine procedures so lax that birds from different continents are kept together, test samples are pooled and there is no clarity in her Department about the true implication of the tests?
	Thirdly, when we surveyed poultry concerns we discovered that fewer than half could recall proactive steps by the Department or any other intermediary body to inform them fully about avian flu. Why, after months of reports about the problem, have the Secretary of State and her Ministers failed to take such proactive steps to inform the poultry sector?
	I turn to the future. What will the Secretary of State do to ensure the proper separation of birds still in quarantine, to which she referred, and to provide proper polymerase chain reaction testing for poultry flocks? Can she guarantee that the compensation paid to farmers for slaughtered flocks will be sufficiently generous to give incentives for full reporting? How will controls at ports of entry be increased to prevent the smuggling of wild birds once the ban is in place? How will commercial imports be distinguished from pet imports that are merely being restricted? Who within her Department will be accountable for ensuring that any outbreak in the poultry flock is fully and immediately contained?
	In the light of past serious failures and the confusion and inactivity surrounding recent events, the House has a right to an assurance from the Secretary of State that from now on it will no longer be business as usual. We do not want to see her Department once again rendered impotent in the face of disaster and the Army brought in to clear up the mess.

Norman Baker: I welcome the fact that the Government are making a statement today and urge the Secretary of State to keep the House informed about future developments. Does she agree that it is important to strike a balance between adopting sensible precautions and not unnecessarily alarming the public or damaging the farming industry? Does she thus share my disquiet about the Edwina Currie-type advice from the European Food Safety Authority on the consumption of eggs and poultry? Will she confirm that there is no greater threat from eating poultry today than there was last week, last month, or last year?
	There are serious questions about the quarantine arrangements in place at both the specific establishment in Essex and more widely. The Secretary of State said in her statement that the quarantine system worked, which was true in the sense that the disease was identified while the bird was still held, but cross-contamination happened. Can she clearly state whether she believes that the regulations in place were broken, or whether they were simply inadequate? The way in which birds were kept must be addressed. Do the regulations currently allow birds of different species to be mixed, which would seem to be a totally inadequate way of dealing with biosecurity?
	Has the Secretary of State seen the report in many papers that birds at the centre in question are
	"kept in excrement-covered cages"?
	Is there any truth in that suggestion? Does she share my disquiet that if the papers are accurate—the matter was widely reported in several national papers—such an important biosecurity centre is apparently being run by an individual who has been jailed for offences relating to the importation of wild birds? Should there not be greater controls on who is permitted to run quarantined establishments? Will she make the examination of quarantine arrangements part of her remit?
	I welcome the decision to introduce an immediate ban on the wild bird trade and thus urge her, as I did her colleague, the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), last Thursday, to pay particular attention to the illegal trade, which will increase as a consequence. Will she especially examine trade on the internet, which causes a major problem in the wild bird trade? Will she explain why I was told that a ban on bird fairs was not necessary when I suggested it to her colleague on Thursday, although she announced today that such a ban will be introduced?
	Finally, can the Secretary of State comment on suggestions in the newspapers that her Department is preparing, as a necessary precaution, for a mass cull of poultry? What will its parameters be, and could the influenza H5 vaccine be used instead?

Mark Durkan: May I welcome the Secretary of State's statement on initiatives and interventions, as well as her Department's readiness to make a further response? Has the Department duly engaged with the relevant devolved Administrations and the not-so-devolved Administration in Northern Ireland? Can she assure us that the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development in Northern Ireland and its Minister will not be restricted or restrained from taking more stringent or specific action, particularly if they wish to do so in concert with the authorities in the Irish Republic?

Margaret Beckett: I can certainly assure the hon. Gentleman that we are in contact with the devolved Administrations, who have offered helpful co-operation. They will consider whether there is any further contribution that they wish to make to the assessment and handling of such cases.

Michael Jack: The Secretary of State has just announced a review of the quarantine procedures, yet in her statement she said that measures to deal with avian influenza were fundamentally sound. If that was the case according to the original analysis why, following the first testing of the system, does it have to be reviewed? As for scenario-playing, how many times has she played the scenario of what to do, and what lessons has she learned from that exercise?

John Greenway: The proposed ban on live poultry sales is prudent and understandable, but will cause a great deal of difficulty for the poultry industry at this critical time of the year. Can the right hon. Lady say what advice her Department will give to the commercial poultry trade about movement of poultry, which will become critical if, as she suggests, it may be necessary to move all poultry indoors? Many producers do not have the accommodation that they require. On a different matter, what help is being given to those eastern European and central Asian countries where bird flu is more endemic and where the problem originates?

Margaret Beckett: I cannot tell the hon. Gentleman what advice will be given, as that is not a matter for me but for the veterinary and scientific experts. I can assure him that we are in touch with people who are engaged in wild bird fairs and so on, and also with the poultry industry. He made a valuable point about the scale of the facilities available. That is exactly the kind of thing that is being discussed. I can assure him that my Department and our officials will do everything we can to maintain the balance of proper protection and proper security precautions with understanding for the commercial necessity. I can also tell him that there is a great deal of contact with, as he rightly says, countries where disease is more endemic. I believe I am right in saying that various expert scientific advisers, not from my Department, but more independently and outside, are in contact with such countries and there is discussion with them to try and help them deal with some of the issues.

Hywel Williams: Can the Secretary of State assure the House that, should a cull be required, we are adequately prepared in respect of disposal of carcases? This is not a party political or polemical point. The experience in rural and remote north-west Wales relating to the introduction of the fallen stock scheme does not inspire confidence within the agricultural industry. Can she reassure the House?

Margaret Moran: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require internet service providers and other commercial organisations providing access to the internet to declare whether or not they have taken steps to prevent access to web sites containing indecent images of children; and for connected purposes.
	The effect of the Bill is to require every internet service provider to declare in its company's annual reports and on its corporate website whether it is actively pursuing measures intended to prevent its customers from obtaining access to known child pornography websites. The Bill would not compel ISPs to take such measures, but would require them only to say whether they are taking such measures.
	Let us not be under any illusion. The situation surrounding internet child pornography is appalling. Just two years ago, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children estimated that 20,000 new images of child pornography go online every week. That is 20,000 new cases of child abuse and rape every single week. There are now hundreds of pay-per-view child pornography sites and thousands of free sites filled with images that would make most people physically sick.
	Operation Ore, the massive police investigation into child internet pornography, identified over 7,000 people in the UK, including judges, doctors and teachers, who used their credit cards to download images of children being abused or even killed for their gratification. Police believe that that is the tip of the iceberg. Those who download such images say that they have committed no crime, but every single vile picture that includes babies and children being raped and tortured has destroyed an innocent life. Through the internet, criminal gangs are making money out of this misery. That has gone unchallenged for too long and the time has come to right this wrong.
	Until recently, the technological challenges to solving all or part of the problem have been formidable. Yet thanks to recent advances, the end of child pornography on the net is now in sight. Over a year ago, BT proved conclusively that the technology now exists to allow ISPs to block access to child pornography on the internet. This effective filtering system, called Cleanfeed, has been live for over 18 months, and allows the user to enjoy the full advantages of the internet minus illegal websites. By blocking the connection between the site and the user, child pornography becomes inaccessible. Instantly, supply will be cut off from demand and the illegal act of producing child pornography will become unprofitable.
	When my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Judy Mallaber) asked the Prime Minister about BT's Cleanfeed last July, he answered positively, welcoming her efforts and BT's efforts and stating his intention to act on the issue by meeting the ISPs. I am pleased to be part of a Government who have taken such a strong stance against child pornography. By increasing the maximum penalties for making, distributing and showing indecent photographs of children, as well as investing in high-tech crime fighting solutions, the Government have repeatedly shown that they are committed to tackling this repugnant crime.
	While I commend the Government on their approach in trying to prevent access to these sites, we need more urgency in ensuring that ISPs act now. I commend those ISPs that have used the available technology to block such sites. AOL, BT, Yahoo and Vodafone are models of good corporate citizenship. However, too many ISPs—possibly as many as 20 per cent.—have not responded to the challenge and still do very little to block child pornography sites. For every day that they delay, more children are being abused, so the Bill is a wake-up call to them. It is not designed to force ISPs to adopt the technology or tell us what technology they use. We want them only to state whether or not they have taken the simple and effective steps necessary to block child pornography
	The Bill is intended primarily as a public accountability mechanism. All UK companies have to make a range of declarations in their annual reports—for example, on health and safety issues or carbon emissions. From that perspective, this is not a revolutionary idea. Although I am interested in a company's policies on global warming, if it happens to be an ISP, there is at least one other aspect of its activities that is more immediately relevant and of interest—what it is doing to end the terrible trade in illegal child sex abuse images.
	If an ISP had good reason for not doing everything that it reasonably can to block access to illegal child abuse images, the Bill would not compel it to change its policies. I am sure that the ISP concerned would stand ready to explain its stance to its customers. Nevertheless, I wonder how many company directors or shareholders would be happy at the thought that they are required to declare publicly that they are doing nothing to stop child sex abuse images reaching their customers. The public, parents and policy makers are all entitled to know who is trying to kill off the trade in illegal child abuse images and who is not.
	Some have argued that this is about the freedom of the net. The Bill is not a pretext for state censorship of the net, but child abuse and rape are illegal. As the head of the NSPCC's specialist investigation service says,
	"we all have a duty to these children and to fail to protect them is a crime in itself."
	Providing this information would enable the public to make reasoned choices about which internet service providers to use.
	The Bill is not a magic button to eradicate child pornography, but the technology exists to limit access, and it is effective. Users have a right to know whether it is being used so that they can make informed choices. I believe that peer pressure and parent power can prevail. BT, the NSPCC, NCH and others believe that child abuse can be severely reduced, but we have to it make happen. It is our responsibility and we need to act now. This is a wake-up call to the slow learners in the ISP community. We will continue to put pressure on them and to name and shame as necessary. I, and many hon. Friends from other parties, stand ready to press for regulation if action is not taken.
	The prize on offer is a great one. If people cannot reach the websites to buy child sex abuse images, the gangsters who are behind the trade will stop systematically arranging for children to be raped purely so they can photograph or film it in order to get new supplies for sale. These guys are only in it for the money that they get by exploiting our children. We need to deprive them of that shop window, and that is what the Bill seeks to do. I commend it to the House.
	Question put and agreed to.
	Bill ordered to be brought in by Margaret Moran, Anne Snelgrove, Helen Goodman, Kitty Ussher, Sandra Gidley, Ian Stewart, Judy Mallaber, Lynda Waltho, Ms Sally Keeble, Mr. Paul Burstow, Sir George Young and Martin Salter.

Charles Clarke: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
	The Bill seeks to place our counter-terrorist legislation on a permanent and secure basis. I should say at the outset that I am well aware that Members on both sides of the House have doubts about two particular aspects of the Bill: first, the definitions of terrorism and glorification and how we describe them; and secondly, the length of time that somebody may be detained before charge, and proposed amendments in that respect. I will come to those issues later in my speech, but I should say now that I am ready to give way to debate them at the relevant time today, although of course the major debates will take place in Committee and on Report on the Floor of the House.
	The Government have said all along that in a matter as important as this legislation we want to proceed on the basis of consensus. In that spirit, I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) and the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten), and to the Select Committee on Home Affairs, the Joint Committee on Human Rights and others, for the constructive tone that they have adopted over the summer.
	I made a commitment to bring forward further counter-terrorism legislation earlier this year during the passage of the Bill that became the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005. Preparations for the Bill were already well under way in early July of this year, and I set out a list of measures to the Opposition spokespeople on 15 July. I am grateful to them both for the constructive response that they were able to give. I also made it clear that we were consulting the police and intelligence agencies in the light of the terrorist attacks and would consider whether additional measures were required. On that basis, I sent out a draft Bill to the Opposition and to Committee Chairs on 15 September.
	In the light of the helpful comments that we received from a variety of sources, on 6 October I set out some revised proposals in respect of the offence of glorification. On the same day, my right hon. Friend the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary published a paper setting out anti-terrorism laws in other countries, which I hope will help to inform today's debate. In the same spirit, through the usual channels we agreed a substantial amount of time to debate the Bill in Committee and on Report on the Floor of the House.
	That is how we reached the stage that we are at today. In addressing the central issue that we face, I must start from the fundamental premise that there is a serious terrorist threat that has to be addressed. From New York, Nairobi, Sharm el-Sheik, Istanbul, two offences in Bali—one recently—Madrid, and our own events in London this July, we know of the existence of that terrorist threat. As we legislate to address it, we must do so on the basis, first, of clarifying the values and society that we are seeking to defend, and secondly, of identifying the threat with which we have to deal.
	Of all the societies throughout the world, perhaps that of the United Kingdom is the society that laid the basis for the values that we here seek to defend: valuing and building free speech and freedom of expression, including a free media; believing in a society that respects all faiths, races and beliefs; believing in a society founded on the rule of law; wanting every citizen to have a democratic stake in our society; valuing the free economy which has built prosperity, including high-quality public services on which we all depend; and valuing the fact that women can play a full role in our society. We all know that our society, based on those values, will continue to evolve and develop. We also know that we can all point to aspects of our society that fall short of those aspirations. However, people on all sides of politics have struggled over the centuries to achieve the values that we celebrate today.
	The society that we have built, with the values that it embodies, is not slight nor passing but deeply rooted and profound. I emphasise that those values are embraced by the overwhelming majority of our citizens, from whatever faith group or minority ethnic group they come. Indeed, most of those who have migrated to our country did so precisely because they wanted to embrace the values that I just set out. Our society is characterised by common values but diverse backgrounds, faiths and lifestyles. It has been a stunningly successful model of integration, despite regular challenges.
	If one compares the United Kingdom of the 1950s, before significant migration took place, with the United Kingdom of today, one sees that in many key parts of life and endeavour—our businesses, our design, our literature, our food; there are too many to name—the vibrancy of diversity has powered creativity and economic success. I emphasise again, however, that that has always happened within the framework of our common democratic values.

Charles Clarke: I greatly respect my hon. Friend; we served together on the Treasury Committee, but he is wrong. If he goes through the list in detail, the striking fact is that those changes were made by democratic processes and with little violence.

Charles Clarke: I think that I have said this about three times now, but I will say it again: we take seriously the points that were raised by the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed and by Lord Carlile. There are important issues that need to be addressed. The Association of Chief Police Officers is working specifically on them, and I shall address them. I agree that there issues that need to be addressed.

Charles Clarke: I do not accept that. I am coming to proscription in a moment, and I will deal with my hon. Friend's point about proscribed organisations. I also observe, however, that the United Nations, in its action against terrorism, has listed proscribed individuals and organisations in a variety of ways.
	Because of the need for this action, it behoves all parties in the House to carry through the ambitions of the Security Council resolution, which the Bill seeks to do. In all candour, I say to the Liberal Democrats, with whom we have sought to work closely—and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Winchester, who has also sought to work closely with us to address these issues—that their decision to oppose the Second Reading of the Bill weakens that common front of democratic politics against terrorism. Let me tell the House why I say that.
	The Liberal Democrats' have legitimate arguments about the definition of terrorism in relation to the term "glorification", and about the extension of the time limit for detention from 14 days to 90 days. I know that the hon. Member for Winchester has doubts, as he has said publicly and privately to me, about the wisdom of extending that time limit, and he has been perfectly fair about that. In relation to the structure of debates in the House, however, I do not believe that such doubts, which will be expressed, voted on and considered in Committee and on Report—and which, if so serious, could lead his hon. Friends to vote against the Bill on Third Reading—ought to break the unity of the House in seeking to carry through the principle established on Second Reading. His leader, the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr. Kennedy), wrote to The Spectator on 22 October—which I thought was a spectacular thing for him to do—revealing that the Liberal Democrat shadow Cabinet was having
	"a strategy meeting about how to provide the real opposition to the government while the Conservatives are mired in their leadership debate."
	I am sure that they are not mired in it; the debates and discussions currently taking place on that matter are inspired and interesting.
	If the Liberal Democrats want to provide real opposition to the Government, the way to do that is not to offer knee-jerk opposition to everything, but to work on the basis of principle, to carry things through and to debate things in a proper way. The principled position, in my view, is for the party to vote for Second Reading, and then vote against, as and when the hon. Member for Winchester thinks appropriate, on the particular measures later. Even at this late stage, I hope that the Liberal Democrats will reconsider their position.

Charles Clarke: I believe that the hon. Gentleman does have a sincere intention in that respect, and is seeking agreement on some issues and trying to put forward positive proposals. He is absolutely entitled to do that. However, the time to address those questions is in Committee and on Report. If, in his view, the matter is resolved unsatisfactorily by the end of that process, he should vote against the Bill on Third Reading. I would understand that, but I do not understand why his colleagues have decided to vote against it on Second Reading.

Charles Clarke: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention, and I agree that it is right to be flexible. I have made it clear throughout that consensus is the right way to proceed, not only in our party, which is an often ambitious target, but even with Opposition Members. It would be better if we sent out a united and coherent message. In Committee, on Report and otherwise, I am ready to be flexible in discussions, if we can reach an agreement. Furthermore, it would be better if the House resolved the matter rather than left it to the other place, but that requires both sides of the House to work constructively to reach agreement.

Sadiq Khan: My right hon. Friend talked about the strategy for fighting terrorism, the final part of which was the international element. The one thing that he missed out, however, is intelligence gathering, which experts tell us is a vital part of the strategy. In addition to concerns about section 44, does he accept that some sections of the Bill limit the ability of our security services to gather intelligence from parts of the community that would otherwise come forward and provide intelligence?

Charles Clarke: I shall give way in a moment, but I shall choose my own time to do so, if I may.
	The Bill extends the provisions to those who disseminate terrorist material, including on the internet, but makes clear that those who simply transmit material that does not reflect their views will not be caught. That will, among other things, enable the United Kingdom to ratify the Council of Europe's convention on the prevention of terrorism, which I think is an important step.
	The encouragement offence also includes glorification, which was a manifesto commitment. After we published our initial proposals, it was clear that there was considerable unease about the proposal for a self-contained offence of glorification of terrorism. In the spirit of consensus, we have now responded to that concern. Accordingly, glorification is now an offence only if the person who glorifies terrorism believes, or has reasonable grounds for believing, that the remarks will be understood as an incitement to terrorist acts.
	Some concern has been expressed about the appropriate definition of terrorism, particularly by the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen. The definition that will apply to the new offences in the Bill is the one that was agreed by Parliament for the Terrorism Act 2000, with the addition of a small change which will bring threats against international bodies, such as the United Nations, within the scope of the definition. Beyond that, the Bill uses the definition of terrorism that has become established in our law.
	The definitions used internationally, such as that used in the recent European Union Council framework decision of 13 June 2000, do not appear to be substantially different, and we do not consider them to have advantages over the definition used in the UK legislation. Following the Security Council resolution from which I quoted earlier, the UN is still seeking agreement—which I think will be difficult to achieve—on an appropriate definition of terrorism.
	Let me emphasise, in the light of the discussion that we have been having, that the Bill will not in any way interfere with the right of political demonstration, with criticism of any regime or with an appeal for change, however strongly worded. Nor will it interfere with the rights of individuals to seek other peaceful means of achieving political ends. What it outlaws is the encouragement of violent attacks.
	The offence of encouragement of terrorism is a serious offence, carrying a maximum sentence of seven years' imprisonment, and has been framed with a number of safeguards. First, the person making the statement must have known, believed or had reasonable grounds for believing that it would have been likely to be understood as an encouragement of terrorism by a member of the audience to whom it was made. Secondly, any prosecution could proceed only with the permission of the Director of Public Prosecutions, who would have to determine whether a prosecution was in the public interest. That is an important safeguard, and not to be taken lightly.

Several hon. Members: rose—

Charles Clarke: I give way to the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve).

Dominic Grieve: I am grateful to the Home Secretary for giving way. I take him back to the definition of terrorism—an issue that we will have to consider very carefully. Is it not true that one reason why terrorism is undefined at the United Nations is that many a despotic regime is only too pleased for any violence used against it to be described as terrorism, just as the Germans described the actions of the French resistance during the second world war as terrorism? We will have to tackle this issue, because as drafted the definition is so wide that legitimate armed resistance to tyranny would be covered and any encouragement of it would be criminalised.

Charles Clarke: As I have said on a number of occasions, I simply do not accept that. Quite apart from points of principle, such as how one could or should have resisted fascism between the wars or promoted change in eastern Europe after the war, it is important to understand— hence my devoting quite a lot of the early part of my speech to the issue—the nature of the terrorist threat that we are dealing with now, compared with some that we have had to deal with in the past. It is right as we legislate today to take that into account.

Several hon. Members: rose—

Charles Clarke: I give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris).

Several hon. Members: rose—

Charles Clarke: I give way to the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove).

Michael Gove: I am very grateful to the Home Secretary for giving way. He is doubtless familiar with the Muslim Council of Britain's media spokesman, Mr. Inayat Bunglawala, who has been asked to advise the Home Office on a number of cultural matters. Mr. Bunglawala has in the past said that Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, who was responsible for the first attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993, was "courageous" and was arrested only because he called on Muslims to fulfil their duty to Allah to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere. Mr. Bunglawala subsequently wrote of Osama bin Laden that he was a "freedom fighter". Are these comments to be criminalised under this legislation?

Several hon. Members: rose—

Charles Clarke: I give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen.

Richard Burden: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. Is it not true that the Bill's definition of terrorism goes rather further than he is suggesting? Paragraph 19 of the explanatory notes states:
	"The Bill also makes use of the term acts . . . of terrorism. Act and action are both defined in section 121 of the TACT",
	which is the Terrorism Act 2000. It continues:
	"Section 1(5) makes it clear that . . . an act is also for the purposes of terrorism if it is taken for the benefit of a proscribed organisation. Clause 20(2) of the Bill makes it clear that acts (or act) of terrorism as used in the Bill includes an act taken for the purposes of terrorism and so includes an act taken for the benefit of a proscribed organisation."
	There is no doubt that Hamas is a terrorist organisation and that it is already proscribed under existing legislation. Let us consider the question of its having a major internal debate about whether to get involved in the political process in the west bank. If a Member of this House tried to use their influence with Hamas—through intermediaries or directly—to persuade it to get involved in that political process, that would probably be to the benefit of that organisation. Would doing so be criminal?

Charles Clarke: First, it would be to the benefit of that organisation, and secondly, it would not be criminal. In fact, Hamas' role in these matters is dealt with.

Charles Clarke: As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) points out from a sedentary position, that is an interesting reinterpretation of the House of Lords' role. I cannot comment on a particular organisation, but I shall look at the case that my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton mentions.
	The Bill creates a new offence of acts preparatory to terrorism that I hope will find favour in all parts of the House. It also deals with training for terrorism and makes it an offence to give or receive training for terrorist purposes, or to attend a terrorist training camp. It contains the necessary measures to enable the United Kingdom to ratify the United Nations convention on the suppression of nuclear terrorism, and it extends the offence of criminal trespass to civil nuclear sites for reasons that, I hope, all Members will understand, given that such sites need the maximum possible protection. On that theme, we have decided that a small number of key military sites should be covered by the protection afforded by the offence of trespassing on a designated site in sections 128 to 131 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. An order designating those sites to be protected will be submitted to the House by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence in due course.
	I should perhaps have emphasised more strongly in my responses the fact that all prosecutions for offences in part 1 require the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions and that any offences involving the affairs of another country also require the consent of the Attorney-General. There is therefore a serious bar in the process in respect of some of the issues that have been raised.
	Part 2 makes changes in respect of proscription. I believe that proscription provides an important part of our armoury in the fight against terrorism and I am grateful that the House recently endorsed without a Division the order to proscribe an additional 15 organisations. The Bill widens the criteria for proscription to encompass groups that glorify terrorism, where it is reasonable to expect that such glorification will be seen by others as an inducement to emulate the terrorist acts in question.

Charles Clarke: I will give way to my hon. Friend when I have made further progress.
	Lord Carlile of Berriew, a Liberal Democrat peer, said in paragraph 61 of his report published on 12 October:
	"I am satisfied beyond doubt that there have been situations in which significant conspiracies to commit terrorist acts have gone unprosecuted as a result of the time limitations placed on the control authorities following arrest".
	That is a strong statement, which I greatly respect. The case for an extension to three months was set out very clearly in my letter of 6 October to Opposition spokespeople and in the accompanying paper from assistant commissioner, Andy Hayman, the nation's most senior anti-terrorist police officer.
	Much of our anti-terrorist legislation derives from our experience of dealing with 30 years of Irish terrorism, but the fact is that we are dealing with a very different threat now and we believe that the current time limit is not well designed to deal with that new threat. Recent terrorist plots have been designed to cause mass casualties, with no warnings, sometimes involving suicide and with the threat of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons, to which Lord Ashdown referred last Monday in the quote that I cited earlier. The need to ensure public safety by preventing such attacks means that it is necessary to make arrests at an earlier stage than in the past, when there was a culture of warnings and where weapons of mass destruction did not exist as now. That often means that less evidence has been gathered at the point of arrest, which means that more time will be needed to gather sufficient evidence to charge a suspect.
	Terrorist networks are often international—another difference in the evolution of the threat that we face. That means that inquiries have to be undertaken in many different jurisdictions and under different rules. Many of those cannot operate to tight time scales. Moreover, establishing the identity or even the nationality of suspects can take a long time and the use of forged and stolen documentation compounds the problem. The global nature of modern terrorism means that it is often necessary to employ interpreters. It is sometimes necessary to find interpreters who can interpret dialects from remote parts of the world. Such interpreters can be hard to find, which, together with interviews to be translated, slows down the process and restricts the amount of time available.
	Terrorist cases are also highly complex. I remind the House that investigations into the events of 7 and 21 July yielded 38,000 exhibits that filled two warehouses, all of which need to be scrutinised. The same investigations required 80,000 videos of CCTV footage to be studied and 1,400 fingerprints across 160 crime scenes. As I said earlier, terrorist networks are now highly capable of using technology. In recent cases, a large number—sometimes in the hundreds—of computers and hard drives have been seized and much of the data on those computers have been encrypted. The examination and decryption of data on such computers and hard drives takes time and expertise; then, of course, the data need to be analysed in order to incorporate the outcome of the analysis into an interview strategy.

Charles Clarke: That precise risk, which the right hon. and learned Gentleman rightly identifies, will be taken into account by the courts when they come to consider any particular charges. The circumstances under which such risks might arise will also be taken into account by the judge who considers the police application for holding a person for a longer period of time.

Charles Clarke: I can answer my right hon. Friend directly: yes, there are specialist prosecutors in the areas that he mentioned, and I accept his recommendation that their use should be developed. However, it is important to note that the CPS' expertise in these matters has led it to support the changes proposed in the Bill. People sometimes say, "Don't trust the experts." I suppose that that is a good guide in many walks of life, and better than saying, "Trust the politicians, they're not experts in anything." The truth is that we should take the views of our experts seriously, whether they be prosecutors, police or something else.

Charles Clarke: Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is deeply wounding to be accused of running away from debate, given the interventions that I have allowed from such a large number of people. If the hon. Gentleman had run for leadership of his party, I promise that I would have given way to him. However, he did not, and I am not sure which candidate he supports today.
	Finally, I draw attention to clause 35, which provides for the appointment of an independent reviewer to report on the operation of the legislation. Earlier, I commended to the right hon. Member for Beith-on-Sea—I mean the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith)—the role played by Lord Carlile. I am sure that the whole House will appreciate the care and attention that he has brought to that role. He is noted for his independence of thought, and the House may be interested to hear what he says about the Bill. In paragraph 111 of his report, he states:
	"I regard the current proposals as providing a set of useful and necessary additions to the law to counter terrorism."
	I commend the Bill to the House.

David Davis: This debate is part of a process that began before 7 July, but which took on a new urgency after that date. On that day, we met to pay tribute to those who lost their lives, and to those who rushed to save them. We do so again today.
	That day was the worst of days, but it brought out the best in the British people. It highlighted an instinctive desire to pull together, an unwillingness to be cowed or bullied by the terrorists, and a stubborn determination to get on with our lives.
	On 7 July, there were a few evil men, but many more good men and women. They responded to the horror with fortitude, self-sacrifice and great generosity. That is the way we defeat terrorism: by holding firm to our beliefs. Global terrorism is an attack on those very things—our way of life, our beliefs, our liberties, and our lives. So let me deal with one crucial argument right up front.
	The Prime Minister said recently:
	"I care about one basic . . . liberty which is the right to life of our citizens and freedom from terrorism"—
	fine words, but we should remember that literally millions of people have died to defend all the liberties that we enjoy today. They were secured through the sacrifices of previous generations. So let us not be the generation that casually gives them away.
	The Conservative party has long stood for liberty under the law, but a belief in individual freedom, in freedom of speech, and in our rights to justice are not the monopoly of any one party. The whole House—every individual Member and party member—faces a difficult but vital challenge with the Bill. We must balance the security of the nation with the rights of ordinary citizens.
	With that warning, let me turn to the substance of the Bill. Let me start by thanking the Home Secretary for the way he has conducted himself throughout the discussions we have had about this piece of legislation, over the entire summer. Despite the pressures from the public, the press, and even the Prime Minister, he has brought a welcome openness of mind to the negotiations. As a result, there are many aspects of the Bill that I am able to support unequivocally.
	We welcome plans to create a new offence of acts preparatory to terrorism; indeed, my party has called for that for some time. We also welcome the powers to clamp down on those who take part in terrorist training, or who visit terrorist training camps. Also, within limits, we support powers to introduce a new offence of indirect incitement to terrorism. Although there are significant drafting problems, all of these, and a number of other detailed aspects of the Bill, are intelligent, proportionate and, arguably, long overdue. They are necessary, and they are necessary now. But there are serious issues with other parts, so we must all pause, draw breath and think through the implications very carefully indeed.

David Davis: My hon. Friend very intelligently pre-empts the next part of my speech. Let me say, because of the important parts of the Bill that are necessary now, we want to see the Bill make progress, but in Committee—which as he is aware will be held on the Floor of the House at our request—and on Report we will be resisting the 90-day proposal, which I will go through in detail in a moment, and seeking to amend quite sharply the proposals on glorification, because they, as the Bill stands, and as has been apparent from the debate so far, are seriously flawed. So we will oppose or amend in Committee and on Report and if we fail in those measures, we shall vote against Third Reading. That is the proposal that I am putting to the House today.

David Davis: Yes, Cameron; I think they are relatives.—[Interruption.] I cannot believe that the Home Secretary is seeking to interfere in the leadership contest by that route, anyway.
	Is it right that Miss Cameron should be held for several hours at a police station for the grave offence of walking on a cycle path?
	Such examples highlight why we must look at new proposals with scepticism until the case is proven. Let us apply that test particularly to those that are the most controversial. The proposed new crime of glorification, which I have been asked about, is one. Today's proposal is better than that originally anticipated when the Prime Minister announced the clause back in August. As the Home Secretary said, he wrote to the Liberal Democrat spokesman and myself. I objected to various aspects of it, as did others, and he has changed it. The revised version has brought together the incitement and glorification clauses of the existing Bill, but the term "glorification" still remains too broad, and I am not convinced that it is necessary or desirable. As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Binley), we clearly have to address a definition of foreign terrorism if we are going to pursue this.
	The proposed law does not require that an individual intends to encourage terrorism in order to commit a crime. It rests on the requirement that someone's comments could "reasonably be expected" to incite terrorism. That is a test of negligence, not criminality. Of course, it also fails the Cherie test. The Prime Minister's wife famously talked sympathetically about the motives of suicide bombers, as the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews) reminded us. Unless the Prime Minister is seriously suggesting that his wife should be locked up, the clause needs to be thought through again. If it cannot be improved in that and the other aspects that have been mentioned today, it must be removed.

Paul Murphy: It has been a fascinating hour and a half. Obviously, the thrust of the debate in Committee will be about the 90-day question, but it seems much more significant—the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis), the shadow Home Secretary touched on this in the final part of his speech—that we in the House must always balance the first duty of any Government to protect their citizens from outrage, death and disaster and the duty to ensure that we safeguard those liberties that, over a 1,000 years, the House has gathered for our people. However, we must be aware that we are in a situation that is not the same as in the past.
	Some hon. Members have referred to a casual Bill, while others have said that it is a knee-jerk reaction to what happened in July, but the reality is that we live in an extremely different world, so far as terrorism is concerned. My experience, which is limited in these matters to Northern Ireland, tells me that the sort of attacks that we saw in July are unprecedented in our history. Although the July bombings came out of the blue in a particular sense, in a general sense, they did not. We had been warned by the security services for many months—indeed, years—that it was inevitable that, sooner or later, we would face the situation that we faced in July.
	During the past weeks, the Committee that I chair —the Intelligence and Security Committee—has investigated the intelligence that may or may not have led people to take certain actions before July, and it will continue to do so in the months to come. The important thing is always that balance, which was not easy over 30 years in Northern Ireland. I suspect that internment did not prove successful, but certain parts of the terrorism legislation, certainly the gathering of intelligence, was extremely successful and helped to bring Northern Ireland to where it is today.
	The Intelligence and Security Committee has already taken evidence on the Bill over two hours or more from the Home Secretary and it will continue to monitor the Bill's progress through both Houses. On those clauses that deal with amendments to the Intelligence Services Act 1994 and to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which relate to the issuing of warrants in the pursuit of national security, I agree strongly with Lord Carlile, whose views my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has touched on already, that the clauses on the intelligence services are helpful in countering terrorism and that, subject to appropriate controls and limitations, they are sensible and practical changes to the law.
	We will as a Committee consider in some detail the deliberations of both Houses during the weeks ahead, but I repeat the point that I made earlier, which must underpin our debates in the House on Second Reading and in Committee, that if anyone thinks that what we have seen over the past weeks and months is something that we have experienced before, they are very much mistaken, and we must adapt new legislation to new circumstances. At the same time, of course, as a number of hon. Members have said, it is not just a question of changing the legislation.
	As my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary suggested and as I am sure my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety will indicate when she responds to the debate, we must consider the Bill in the context of a whole range of measures that exist to protect our citizens from the sort of outrages that we experienced in the summer in London. For example, we need to recruit more people to our police and our security services. We need to combat the so-called radicalisation of some of our communities. Religious leaders and Governments need to work together very closely. Police forces need special branches that can cope with the fresh challenges posed by 21st-century terrorism.
	It is worthwhile, too, to put on record that the way in which the agencies and the emergency services reacted in July has been praised right across the world, as has the way in which we responded to that outrage in our capital city. All these issues must be taken in the round, as a whole. For example, on the restructuring of the police, there is no question in my mind about the fact that we need police forces that can deal with the intelligence requirements and the need to counter terrorism in the modern world. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has rightly decided to look at those issues.
	I want to digress, but on an important point. In Wales, the situation is slightly different from the rest of England as regards the police, and an all-Wales police force, accountable to the Home Secretary but working closely with the National Assembly, would be sensible. However, long-standing, effective and successful forces, such as Gwent, should be able to continue in some form within the new structures so that accountability, efficiency and community support are retained.
	None of us wants more counter-terrorism legislation and none of us wants freedom and security constantly balanced, as they must be, but all of us must acknowledge that the world has changed. To protect our freedoms we have always to protect our people.

Mark Oaten: Like other Members, I start by referring to the events that took place in London during the summer and in doing so pay two tributes. The first is to the intelligence and police forces that handled that three or four-week period with great integrity and received much public support for their management of the process.
	Secondly, I pay tribute to the Home Secretary who dealt with those difficult circumstances with great calm, not only at the time of the attack that killed so many people but also a few weeks later when the failed attacks took place in London. I also welcomed the fact that, although he was busy and focused, he was courteous enough to include his opposite numbers in the discussions and to keep the Opposition parties briefed. That was an appropriate response and I am very grateful.
	The Liberal Democrats have always acknowledged, even during those long hours in January when we were debating the control orders, that there is a real threat to this country from terrorism. Our cross-party differences have been not about whether there is a threat to London and other cities but about the appropriate response to that threat. We remain convinced that the issues are serious and we do not in any way underestimate the need for a proportionate response. We accept that there is a terrorist threat.
	The issue has always been about the level and balance of the response to the threat. I have thought long and hard about our party's approach to the Bill. Any responsible politician wants to introduce measures that will make the country safer and it would be irresponsible not to look at measures that could make all of us safer as we walk through the streets of our cities. I was very taken with the Prime Minister's remarks, at press conference after press conference, about civil liberty and the principle of freedom that we should be able to walk freely without fear of attack. Of course we support that. However, as politicians we also need to argue for other freedoms and civil liberties and for the important principle that we do not hand the terrorists a backhanded victory by doing away with our strong principles of justice.
	When the bombings took place in London, people said time and again that they did not want the bombings to change their way of life. From that, I drew the conclusion that they wanted sensible measures to make their lives safer but that were not so draconian as to change the way that they lived their everyday life.
	It was right that the three parties came together during the summer to try to achieve consensus. At that point, the public wanted their politicians not to disagree, but to work together and try to find a way forward. We made much progress in agreeing and signing up to three measures that are in the Bill and still have our support. However, during September, problems emerged, as the Home Secretary said, when the Government decided to go further than the three measures to which we had agreed.
	Our party felt that a wide, sweeping new offence of glorification was unacceptable, too hard to tie down in law and would infringe freedom of speech. We also felt that the principle of holding people for three months without charge was a step too far. It was at that point that the consensus began to fall apart. I welcome the fact that the Home Secretary has thought again about the provisions on glorification. The removal of the former clause 2 is extremely welcome, but will he go one step further and address the use of glorification in clause 21? It seems to be very much used as it was in its previous incarnation—as one of the grounds for banning organisations. If there could be the same movement on the use of that word as occurred in clause 2, I should certainly welcome it. In substance, we support a large amount of the legislation. We are left with one significant objection about which I shall speak later.
	I reiterate the point I made in my intervention. I understand the Home Secretary's irritation at our decision not to support the Bill this evening. I repeat that we are determined to try to get consensus back on track in Committee. We want to persuade the Home Secretary and the Government that there are alternatives to holding suspects for three months. However, he needs to understand the strength of feeling about the issue in my party and why we felt that rather than waiting to show our objections on Third Reading—if those provisions remain unchanged—we had to send the Government the strongest possible signal that, if things stay the same and the clause remains in the Bill, we could not support it. That is why we felt that it was right to make that stand tonight. However, our commitment to try to resolve the issue and our commitment as a party to support a changed and modified Bill on Third Reading remain.

Mark Oaten: In Committee, we shall want to look at the whole question of intent and when I talk about the indirect incitement provisions I want to look at how both intent and likelihood are built in, so I shall address those points when I get to that section of my speech.
	I want to deal with some of the measures that we support. First, we have long argued that acts preparatory to terrorism should be a criminal offence. We argued that when the Newton committee reported and when we were dealing with derogations from the European convention on human rights. We said that such an offence was a better way of getting suspects into court than holding them without charge. The provisions on acts preparatory have a clear level of intent built into them and that principle should run through the whole Bill.
	Secondly, we very much support the creation of a new offence of training for terrorism although I want to flag up one concern. The Bill also includes an offence of attending a place used for terrorist training. It would be nonsense if, for example, journalists who attended a place of training as part of their investigative work fell foul of such an offence. We need to tidy that up in Committee.
	Thirdly, and more problematically, we support the idea of creating an offence of indirect incitement to terrorism. We support it because there will be occasions when people with some influence will be able to use either written or spoken language with the clear intention of encouraging others to commit a terrorist attack. That should be an offence in this country. The problem is that the clause, and the criminality of the statement, depend on the interpretation of a third party, not the statements themselves or the intentions of a publisher. It depends very much not on what somebody says but on how other people react to what they say. We have concerns about the provision, but we broadly support it.
	It would be extremely helpful if some safeguards could be included. At present, the offence is modelled on the proposal of the Council of Europe convention on the prevention of terrorism, which was signed earlier this year. Under that convention, there are two key safeguards: first, incitement must be intentional and, secondly, there must be the likelihood of a terrorist attack as a result. As we explore the matter in the next couple of weeks, it would be helpful if we could move back towards that model and build into the Bill those sensible twin safeguards that are already enshrined in the European convention on the prevention of terrorism.
	As I said, those matters have our broad support, but before I address our key difficulty with the Bill, I want to touch on the definition of terrorism itself. We have debated the way in which we define terrorism and it is my general view that the current definition is too wide. The Home Secretary helpfully wrote a note to the shadow Home Secretary and me yesterday in which he outlined his arguments for why—bluntly—he thinks that that definition is probably the best one in town and we should thus probably try to stick with it. He said that the definition was very close to that drawn up by the EU in 2002, but I am worried that there is an important difference between the Home Secretary's definition and that of the EU.
	Under the Home Secretary's definition, there could be circumstances in which animal rights groups and groups such as Greenpeace could fall foul of terrorist legislation, as he acknowledged in one of his recent Select Committee appearances. The EU definition includes the phrase:
	"extensive destruction . . . likely to endanger human life".
	Tagging on that additional phrase is helpful by making an attack on property or a field a separate issue. The EU phrase would clearly add an extra layer to the definition that would give confidence to people like me who are worried that the definition of terrorism being used is too broad. I am not suggesting that it would be easy to redefine terrorism, but the small EU addition would go some way towards improving our definition of terrorism, which we would all like to see better defined.
	I turn to our major concern, which the shadow Home Secretary outlined in detail: the provisions of clause 23. Why is the question of holding suspects for such a long time a key principle for this party? Article 40 of Magna Carta says:
	"to no man will we deny or delay justice or right".
	That has been an established principle of our criminal justice system for some 800 years. That principle of liberty has been adopted across the globe. Indeed, article 40 of Magna Carta is the forerunner of article 6 of the European convention on human rights, which says:
	"everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time".
	To put it simply, as long as we have had justice in this country, that principle has been at the heart of it.

Mark Oaten: I now wish that I had adopted the Home Secretary's approach on taking interventions from the hon. Gentleman, but I might be able to cover that point.
	I now turn to the four matters on which I have made it clear that the police have a genuine case. The police are justified in saying that it would be difficult to deal with forensic evidence, encryption, mobile phone records and the international data trail in a 14-day period. However, we think that there are other ways in which those difficulties could be overcome.
	The first way is that raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) during an intervention. The Bill creates the kind of offences that could be used as a tool to charge individuals within a 14-day period. I was grateful for the Home Secretary's acknowledgment today and during his appearance before the Home Affairs Committee that he wants to consider that matter. I acknowledge that there are two problems with moving towards that position. First, such lower charges could have a bail attached. Secondly, it is currently difficult to interview someone after they have been charged. However, both those problems can be overcome. As the shadow Home Secretary said, there must be a way in which we can deal with those difficulties by, for example, changing guidelines under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 to see whether or not lower offences should have bail attached. Making such changes, as the right hon. Gentleman said, is a lesser change than those that have been proposed. I believe that the Attorney-General is looking at these issues and, if we can speed up that review, it will be tremendously helpful in finding a way forward. If the Home Secretary suggested that changes were made to allow individuals to be charged with lower offences it could be argued that some individuals would not fall into that category, as they could not be charged with a lower offence. I find that argument questionable. If the police decide to arrest someone, they must have grounds and evidence for doing so. I find it hard to believe that there are circumstances in which such evidence could not be used to charge someone with an offence.

Elfyn Llwyd: May I commend to the hon. Gentleman the use of section 47(3) of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 which, coupled with stringent conditions such as tagging, curfew and reporting requirements, is a way of meeting his concerns?

Tony Lloyd: The Home Secretary is right to remind us of the grave threats that our society faces from terrorism. Every Member of the House would be at one with him on that. However, the House has a duty to find a balance between measures that are necessary in an era of new technical challenges and new types of terrorism, and safeguards for the traditional values of our society and the legitimate rights of those who stand accused of certain offences.
	I was interested in various sub-debates that have taken place this afternoon. I distinctly remember, as some of our Northern Ireland colleagues may also recall, that at the time of the introduction of internment and detention without trial in Northern Ireland, one of the almost certain effects of that was to radicalise, and not in an acceptable way, a generation of those on the then republican side of the political divide. I speak from near-personal experience. It was a profound mistake on the part of the Labour Government of the day, who introduced those measures.
	I say that not because the debate today is about the introduction of the same principles of detention or internment, but because we must measure the impact of the Bill not only in terms of the legitimate enhancement of the security of society, and not even in terms of its impact on those who come within the power of the legislation, but in terms of its wider social impact if it is deemed not to be appropriate or proportionate to the challenge that we face. That is the problem that I see with at least two aspects of the Bill.
	The first relates to the better rehearsed arguments about the 90-day period of detention. Like many hon. Members, I feel extremely uncomfortable that the case has not been properly made that that length of time is necessary. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) is being over-cynical when he says that the measure is a police bargaining chip, but we need a much more robust defence of their need for anything like that increase in the period of detention or for any increase at all, before the House accepts that they should be the arbiters as we, the House of Commons, seek to erode the freedom of our fellow citizens. That case has not been made today.
	As my hon. Friend observed, under existing legislation only two people have been held for 13 days, not the full 14 days. Both were charged at the end of that period. Although it is not possible to argue by extension that the period must be absolute and precise, that is at least an indication that so far the police have not found the present arrangements inappropriate for the type of activities with which they have had to deal. Things can change, but the case must still be better made.

Sadiq Khan: In support of that argument, does my hon. Friend agree that there have been 10 occasions where somebody has been detained for more than seven days but less than 14 days and released without charge, and in none of those 10 cases was the individual re-arrested at a later date when the police or the authorities had deciphered any encrypted computer data or any other data that had come to their attention? That supports the argument that there is no evidence for extending from 14 days to 90 days the period in custody without charge.

Tony Lloyd: My hon. Friend helps me in the case that I am presenting. We need an intelligent debate and we need to consider whether the present structures are appropriate. The case has not been made for the legitimacy of the leap from 14 to 90-day detention in terms of the need for the police to interrogate suspects and obtain evidence. Therefore, I, like many hon. Members, share the concerns, and I hope that we will see a robust debate in Committee and during further proceedings on the Bill as we examine where the proper balance and test should come.
	The question of glorification troubles me every bit as much as the 90-day period. It is easy to dismiss this by asking, "Are we not all against those who advocate the killing and maiming of others?" But I want to remind the House that, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) said earlier, many of us have lived through periods in our political lives when we have not simply sought to explain but actively advocated the concept of armed force as a legitimate defence. I met someone in Guatemala many years ago who told me how, under the military Government at the time, he saw his father taken off a bus and told to hold his hands out, whereupon they were systematically macheted off, salami style, by members of the armed forces. That was a particularly brutal crime, and at the time it was a particularly brutal way of persuading me that it was legitimate to defend the ordinary peasants of Guatemala by recourse to the force of arms. I cannot run away from that view these years later simply because that country is now, happily, at peace. My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris) referred to the situation in Burma today, a situation that ironically and tragically is parallel to that in Guatemala.

Robert Marshall-Andrews: I agree entirely with the point that my hon. Friend makes, but does he agree that this Bill is even worse because one need not agree with the violence, all one has to do to bring oneself under the Bill's provisions is to express sympathy or understanding with those carrying it out?

Douglas Hogg: I will return to some of the points made by the hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Tony Lloyd), because I agree with much that he said.
	This is a Bill that the House would do well to scrutinise with considerable rigour: first, because it was born out of crime and tragedy—the recent events in July—and Bills that are enacted so soon after such events are frequently seriously flawed; and secondly, because it follows a raft of legislation that we have passed since 2000, in the shape of three substantial Acts. If these matters are so important, it is difficult to see why they were not included in that legislation.
	I am willing to concede that there are parts of the Bill that most Members would support, myself included—particularly clauses 5 and 6, which deal with ancillary acts, and those clauses that deal with radioactive material. However, they are not the core of the Bill. One has to go to the core to determine whether to support the measure. When I go to its core, I find myself unable to vote for it. Indeed, I shall vote against it.
	Let me begin with clause 23, which enables a person who is not charged with an offence to be held in custody for up to 90 days. That is deeply offensive and, while it remains in the Bill, the measure should be opposed. There are several reasons why the provision is deeply offensive and I shall enumerate them briefly. First, it amounts to administrative detention, which we deplored when it was done in South Africa under the apartheid regime. We deeply criticise the state of Israel when it does that today. Secondly, it contravenes a basic rule of English law that a person should not be held in custody for extended periods unless convicted of or charged with a serious offence.
	There are two further points of a more technical nature. First, it is inevitable that the provision will bear most harshly on the ethnic and religious minorities in this country. They will say, with some force, that they are being treated in a discriminatory manner. That will increase the sense of alienation that one often finds in those communities. Secondly, I raise a point that I have previously put to the Home Secretary and to the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten). What weight can one properly place on confessions when they are made after an extended period in custody? To put the same point in reverse: what weight can one place on accusations by detained persons of third parties when they have been detained for extended periods? The 90-day provision opens up the prospect of serious injustice.
	Let me deal briefly—I know that others wish to speak—with clauses 1 and 2. First, the common law offences of conspiracy and incitement already cover much of the ground in the provisions. Secondly, the right of free speech should be safeguarded and fought for, even if it involves hearing things that one might find deeply offensive. For example, when Gerry Adams speaks of the "glorious volunteers" of the IRA, I am deeply offended. After all, the IRA murdered thousands of our fellow citizens, including four Members of this House, who were friends and colleagues of many of us who are still in this place. We are deeply offended when Gerry Adams speaks in those terms. However, I do not wish his words to be criminalised. When the BBC was banned from broadcasting such words, Labour party spokesmen rightly denounced the Government.
	It is better by far that bad men reveal themselves by their words and deeds so that they can be judged than that they suppress their true intentions and gain a reputation that they do not deserve.

Douglas Hogg: No, it is not. After all, the Attorney-General, good as he may be, is nothing more than the in-house lawyer of the Government. And let us not forget that that in-house lawyer provided the advice on which the Iraqi war was justified, contrary to the opinion of many of us who sit in this place.

John Denham: It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg), with whom I find myself agreeing far more than is good for my sense of comfort.
	May I start by praising the Home Secretary for his general approach to the legislation and willingness to make himself available to Members, and particularly for the many hours that he spent in front of Select Committees, including the Home Affairs Committee? The way that he has approached the issue gives me some confidence that a useful piece of legislation will be produced at the end of the process. I will certainly vote for the Bill tonight, although certain aspects of it need a rethink.
	It is important to get the Bill in perspective. The major changes needed to terrorist legislation have been made in previous Acts. Despite the dramatic claims that the rules have changed, this Bill is rather marginal to the issue of our security. The real battle against terrorism is not in the battle over legislation in the House but in the community and the country outside. It is in our policing, our intelligence, the development of community support, and crucially, in winning the hearts and minds of people at home and abroad.
	This is a long-term fight. Once terrorism is established, it takes years to get rid of. In my view, we will be extremely lucky if we are not facing attacks such as those that we have seen in London for the next 30 years. These are not, therefore, short-term, emergency measures. To all intents and purposes, they are permanent. The fight against terrorism does not lend itself to short-term initiatives. The public need to be reassured that things are being done, but they want to be safer.
	In parts of the Bill, the Government are betraying a serious misunderstanding of what is at stake. This is not a battle over what people are allowed to say; it is a question of how we win arguments. The key battle is for hearts and minds. We must persuade young British people from the Muslim community who feel angry about what is happening in the world, in Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya, and who feel that in the west their Muslim lives are less valuable than others' and their rights less valued than others', that engagement in politics, democracy, public life and argument is the way to achieve change, not terrorism.
	Against us are the extremists arguing the opposite—that there is no way forward for them in western democracy; that it is a sham, an illusion and a dead end; and that terrorist violence is not only justified but the only way. We must be careful not to feed that argument. As the Bill stands, however, it is more helpful to the propaganda of the extremists than it is in winning hearts and minds.
	The Bill is drawn too widely. Let us draw briefly on the Northern Ireland experience. We banned the IRA but we tolerated Sinn Fein, not, in my view, because we thought that they were entirely separate organisations, but because we believed that it was better to draw the supporters of militant republicanism into a political process of democracy than to leave them supporting purely violent action. Today, there are organisations in the world such as Hamas. I hold no brief for it, and we have proscribed it as a terrorist organisation. Many people in our society, however, who totally condemn the London bombings, would see Hamas in a different light, as a product of the situation in Palestine—something understandable, and for a significant number of them, justifiable; not just a terrorist organisation but one that takes part in and wins elections.

John Denham: I referred earlier to the support that I gave, openly and publicly, to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the early 1980s. Flawed though they were, that Government were a great deal better than the dictatorship that was overthrown by violence—violence that the Bill defines as terrorism.
	My position explicitly acknowledges that the world is a messy and complicated place. Political violence arises in many circumstances, and we must understand each of them and respond accordingly. We used as a country to understand that to our fingertips. In many ways, the history of decolonisation is the history of fighters being turned into statesmen and the supporters of fighters being turned into members of political parties. As we know, it did not always work, but we knew that it had to be done. We had to win the arguments of engagement, of alternative ways of doing things.
	It is much simpler to say, "We do not want to understand all the different situations. All we need to do is say that this is wrong." That is what the Bill seeks to do, but I have to say that such simplicity will not work. If the Bill had the limited objective of stopping indirect incitement—direct incitement is already covered—of people living in this country to take part in terrorist actions, here or abroad, that involve the deliberate targeting and indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians, I would have no problem with it. I would have no problem with a Bill that drew the line where it needs to be drawn: between what the Home Secretary described today as indiscriminate terrorism, or what could be described as nihilism, and the much wider and more complicated set of political movements that sometimes use violence in various circumstances. But it does not do that, and I am worried that it betrays a profound misunderstanding of the problem.
	I am hugely grateful to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary for acknowledging in this debate, and beforehand in discussions, that we need to look at alternative definitions of terrorism, and we will doubtless return to this issue at greater length next week in Committee. However, I do not share the view, which he circulated to the Opposition spokesmen and to me in my role as Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, that the other definitions on offer are no better than that in our legislation. First, there are significant differences between them. For example, there is a significant difference between the Council of the European Union framework decision, which uses phrases such as "seriously intimidating a population" and
	"seriously . . . destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country",
	and our own legislation, which talks about
	"serious violence against a person"
	and "serious damage to property". The threshold is much higher.
	I am no international lawyer—in fact, I am not a lawyer of any sort, for which I regularly give thanks—but perhaps equally significant is UN Security Council resolution 1566, which clearly locates terrorism primarily in terms of action against civilians. It also refers to criminal acts in a way that, I suspect, excludes genuine liberation movements and genuine violence against oppression. We could also use wording such as the following:
	"any action . . . that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a Government or an international organisation to do or to abstain from doing any act."
	That passage comes not from any international agreement but from the report of the high-level working group that prepared for the UN summit on its 60th anniversary last month.
	Although such a definition would certainly catch the indiscriminate terrorist attacks on civilians of organisations such as Hamas, it would none the less draw the line in the right place. It would send a political message about exactly what it is that we are trying to tackle. It is a line that any reasonable person—including those in the Muslim community on whom we are relying to win the argument—cannot possibly be against, whatever they might think about the situation in Chechnya, the middle east or Kashmir. Killing civilians indiscriminately for political purposes is wrong, and that is where we need to set the argument. I hope that we can return to this issue in some detail next week, and build on what the Home Secretary has said today in order to deliver an improvement to this part of the Bill.
	I agree with what Members in all parts of the House have said about intent, and I hope that we can deal with that issue. I shall largely leave aside the 90-day issue, given the limited time available, but with the right combination of procedural safeguards and a perhaps more realistic assessment of the time that the police genuinely need, we should be able to reach agreement on this issue. I look to next week's debates to provide such agreement.

Richard Shepherd: I agree in great measure with the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham). His words encapsulated a particular concern of mine. He said that he thought that this proposed legislation is essentially marginal in the fight against terrorism, and the House should pause to consider that point. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) pointed out the extent to which we have legislated in recent years to meet what is clearly an exigency and a massive concern to those whom we represent: the eruption of legislation that fails to deal with the dangers—if we take the Home Secretary's view on this issue—that we face. When examined, the question of necessity arises. What is so necessary about this legislation? It is difficult to put one's finger on the essential element that underpins the conclusion that it is necessary to place restrictions on our freedom of speech.
	We must bear in mind the various offences of incitement already in UK law. Incitement to violence, including terrorist violence, is already a criminal offence, as is incitement to commit an act of terrorism overseas, by virtue of section 59 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Solicitation to murder is an offence under section 4 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and incitement to racial hatred is a crime under the Public Order Act 1986. A wide range of criminal offences is already available. Why, then, is a new offence of encouragement of terrorism, including by its glorification, necessary?
	I am not sure that I have grasped the Home Secretary's arguments at all. He told the Home Affairs Committee that the problem was that
	"the current law of incitement essentially deals with a very particular event, which an individual committing an event is incited to commit, for example to commit a very particular act in a particular way . . . that means it is difficult to prosecute in the more general circumstance where an individual organisation is inciting in general but not linked to a very particular crime."
	Like the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen, I am not lawyer, but in the Regina v. El-Faisal case of 2004, the Court of Appeal upheld the convictions of a minister of Islam—for soliciting murder under section 4 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and for incitement to racial hatred under the Public Order Act 1986—for having made audio tapes urging Muslims to fight and kill, among others, Jews, Christians, Americans, Hindus and other "unbelievers". In the course of its judgment, the Court of Appeal explained the great width of the offence of soliciting to murder:
	"The offence of soliciting to murder is contained in s. 4 of the 1861 Act which states:
	'Whosoever shall solicit, encourage, persuade or endeavour to persuade, or shall propose to any person, to murder any other person, whether he be a subject of her Majesty or not, and whether he be within the Queen's dominions or not, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable to imprisonment for life.'"
	That amounts to a more severe penalty than is envisaged by the Home Secretary.
	The scope of the behaviour sufficient to constitute the offence was classically given more than 100 years ago by Lord Huddleston, who provided an interpretation:
	"The largest words possible have been used, 'solicit'—that is defined to be, to importune, to entreat, to implore, to ask, to attempt to try to obtain; 'encourage', which is to intimate, to incite to anything, to give courage to, to inspirit, to embolden, to raise confidence, to make confident; 'persuade' which is to bring any particular opinion, to influence by argument or expostulation, to inculcate by argument; 'endeavour' and then, as if there might be some class of cases that would not come within those words, the remarkable words are used, 'or shall propose to', that is say, make merely a bare proposition, an offer for consideration."
	I have troubled the House with a lengthy excerpt, but I am trying to demonstrate that the Home Secretary has not answered the core of our fight—a national fight, which affects our constituents—and has not demonstrated why, given the present state of the law, clauses 1 and 2 are necessary.
	It is the wider implications that really worry me. Freedom of expression is perhaps the most important and basic right in a democracy. It did not come about casually, as we said last week in debating the Identity Cards Bill. It was a long march, and many of the acts that brought us to where we are—the Home Secretary has defined democracy—were products that would be caught by the legislation in any event. That is the truth of the matter. Those who burned rickshaws, if that was their march, would be caught by it, as I read the provisions. Is that really our intent—to define our own democracy in those terms?
	In respect of the extension to the overseas provisions, the Home Secretary said that he had attended the ceremony—in St. Paul's cathedral, no less—marking the 60th anniversary of the UN. The UN has nearly 200 members, but would we call all of them democracies, even though they all subscribe to the universal declaration of human rights? The hypocrisy is writ large, and the Home Secretary offers an extraordinary historical analysis when he claims that the movement in the world at large is towards democracy. However, that process of edging towards democracy has often been ignited by something else.
	Mr. Mugabe, through his country's membership of the UN, subscribes to those universal principles. People in other benighted countries suffer under the heel of cruel and vicious Governments, but do we tell those who rise up against their privations that anything that improves their lot is passable? No: the Home Secretary says that there is an ineluctable movement towards world democracy, but that is simply neither true nor real. In the pursuit of the Home Secretary's dream, we are asked to degrade and undermine some of our basic principles of freedom and democracy.
	It is the crafting of the Bill that worries so many of us. The principle behind extending detention to 90 days clearly nags at the consciences of many hon. Members. There has to be some form of compromise.
	I am grateful that the Government concede that the matter is important enough to be discussed on the Floor of the House. That allows all hon. Members to examine the proposals and express their opinion about it. Would to God that we had the same right in respect of so many of the instruments that come before us. Nevertheless, I congratulate the Government on their approach today.
	I think that the Bill will founder on the Government's flagship Human Rights Act 1998, that at some time it will be declared to be incompatible with that legislation, and that we will be back to where we started. There will come a time when the House has to determine whether an instrument of declaratory power is appropriate to the circumstances that we face. The Bill challenges our declaratory principles of freedom of expression and the proportionality of actions taken by the state to meet the exigencies that we face.

Michael Meacher: It is always a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd), and I agree with a great deal of what he said.
	As expected, the Home Secretary offered a very robust defence of the Bill. No one doubts that it was the Government's duty, and his in particular, to take all appropriate steps to protect the population against terrorism, especially in the light of 7 July, but any Bill designed to achieve that purpose must be tested against several criteria.
	First—and this question was rightly posed by the hon. Gentleman for Aldridge-Brownhills—is the Bill a necessary addition to the existing corpus of law to prevent acts of terrorism in the UK? Last year, the Director of Public Prosecutions told the Joint Committee on Human Rights that there was
	"an enormous amount of legislation that can be used in the fight against terrorism."
	Indeed, the common law of incitement and the Terrorism Act 2000 already provide very considerable scope for prosecution. For example, the Bill's new offence of encouragement of terrorism has been justified on the grounds that it is intended to criminalise incitement to murder, yet acts of incitement to murder or terrorism are already punishable by life imprisonment. In fact, I suspect that any difficulty in bringing prosecutions at the present time is much more likely to arise from the self-imposed ban on admissibility of intercept evidence, which in my view should be lifted, than from the absence of a prosecutable offence. Therefore it is not clear that the Bill passes the first test.
	The second test is whether the Bill is drafted tightly enough to catch those against whom it is allegedly directed and not those who may unintentionally be trapped by loose drafting? It is certainly to be welcomed that, after considerable concern has been expressed, the original proposal about glorification of terrorism has now been dropped. But encouragement of terrorism is still drawn extremely broadly. In particular, as others have said, it allows acts to be criminalised without the need for intention by the person committing the offence. That is wrong and we must return to that next week.
	Moreover—almost everyone has mentioned this—the definition of terrorism under clause 1 is so wide that, contrary to what I think the Home Secretary was saying, it would criminalise calls to overthrow oppressive regimes where democratic means do not exist. In my reading of the definition, it would have caught those supporting the African National Congress and its methods in the fight against the apartheid regime. It would also have caught those calling for action involving, for example, violence against property, even if not violence against the person, against such regimes as North Korea, or Burma—that has been mentioned—or Ceausescu's regime in Romania, and would have criminalised those who called for action against the Nazi regime in Germany.

William Cash: I fear that some of the discussion that we have heard this afternoon has perhaps gravitated rather more towards the experiences of those in the criminal law than towards the questions that lie at the heart of the Bill. This legislation is about terrorism, and I would make the case strongly that we verge closely in that context on the problems that exist in a state of war, as I indicated in an earlier intervention. During our discussions on the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 in March this year, there was a failure to appreciate that the most important thing was to achieve a balance—security on one hand and liberty on the other. I am bound to say that I have more sympathy with the Government's position in respect of the Bill than do some of my right hon. and hon. Friends.
	The criteria applied under the Human Rights Act 1998 and, indeed, in respect of the European convention on human rights must be regarded as a question of proportionality in the context of the threat that exists to public order and public safety. Indeed, I took exception during the proceedings on the former Bill in March to the line that was then being taken by those who sit on the Conservative Front Bench with respect to the question of our complying with the obligations under the Human Rights Act 1998 in relation to control orders and terrorist suspects. I thought that profoundly wrong, and I continue to feel the same way about the application of the ECHR to the Bill.
	I would not want to give the slightest impression that I am in favour of taking away rights that I thought justifiable, as enacted by the House. Indeed, in a very short clause that I produced to the Bill in March, I said that nothing in any Act should stand in the way of
	"a writ of habeas corpus or other prerogative remedy and . . . a fair trial in accordance with due process and the rule of law."
	I believe profoundly that, whether or not a person is a terrorist or someone who incites hatred or whatever else, that person should in no way be denied the opportunity to benefit from habeas corpus, the rule of law and a fair trial. Indeed, I had an exchange with the Home Secretary during those previous proceedings, and he said that habeas corpus would apply. There was some serious doubt about that at the time, but the reality is that, in the context of the Bill, the Government have dug themselves into a substantial hole in trying to have their cake and eat it.
	In my opinion, it is not possible for the Government to avoid tackling the problem of the application of the Human Rights Act 1998 to such legislation. Indeed, Lord Carlile made it clear in a well considered report that he thought that a period of up to three months was justifiable on the evidence that he heard. I hope that we hear more during our proceedings about what that evidence amounted to. Lord Carlile thought that the Government would have serious problems preventing the Law Lords from eventually ruling against provisions in the Bill on the grounds of the Human Rights Act. We have seen that after enormous amounts of time and delay, Belmarsh and other cases were taken to the courts and the Government's declarations of compatibility with the Act were struck down.
	The remedy is simple. If the Government want to legislate for a specific purpose, based on evidence they provide, and if they can make a case on the Floor of the House and in Committee to justify extension of the period to three months or a bit less—whatever emerges from the debates—they should seize the nettle and, as I suggested earlier, include the provision:
	"notwithstanding the Human Rights Act 1998".
	I do not need to take the House through the case law, save to say that Lord Hoffmann made it perfectly clear in a case a few years ago, as did the Lord Chancellor when the Human Rights Act was going through the House, that the 1998 Act can be amended by unambiguous subsequent legislation passed in the House. Just as it is the first priority of the Government to ensure the protection and security of the nation, so it is the first principle of the House to make up its mind about the legislation it wants to ensure that protection. That may bring us into dispute with some members of the judiciary, but it would not be for the first time over the many centuries that the House has existed. I profoundly believe that we must legislate according to the proper requirements of protection of the nation and that that should be decided in Parliament and not in the courts. That is the first and fundamental principle.
	Secondly, I want to refer to the report of the Gardiner Committee in 1975, when similar problems emerged with regard to the protection of the nation from IRA terrorism. The report stated:
	"Some of those who have given evidence to us have argued that such features of the present emergency provisions as the use of the Army in aid of the civil power, detention without trial, arrest on suspicion and trial without jury are so inherently objectionable that they must be abolished on the grounds that they constitute a basic violation of human rights."
	I remind Labour Members that that was a Labour Lord Chancellor in a Labour Government. The report continued:
	"We are unable to accept this argument . . . The suspension of normal safeguards for the liberty of a subject may sometimes be essential, in a society faced by terrorism, to counter greater evils."
	As I made clear earlier, it is essential that if the period of time is to be extended beyond 14 days, there should be no possibility of not holding a serious review by a senior judge of the circumstances in which the person is being held. It cannot be left to district, or even circuit, judges. The cases would be few and far between, so fair process—fair trial and habeas corpus—must be reinforced as the most fundamental principle on which we rely. However, that does not mean that terrorists or suspected terrorists should be given a more privileged position than they deserve.
	There are extremely good reasons why the Government must take the ultimate responsibility for such legislation, but they must also act responsibly. On the whole, the legislation is right, although I am slightly worried about the definition of the glorification of terrorism, but we can look into that at a later stage. There are ways of dealing with the questions about trial and detention and, with respect to some of my hon. Friends, they should not be too worried about an arbitrary time of 14 days.

Chris Mullin: With all due respect to my hon. Friend, that point rather rebounds on him. If it has not been necessary to detain anyone for more than 14 days so far, it is a rather large leap to say that we now urgently need a 90-day provision.
	If a time period of 90 days is now essential, why, when the police were last consulted only a little over two years ago—terrorism had been with us for some time by then—did they ask for a rise from seven to only 14 days? I do not understand why their request has suddenly leapt from 14 days to 90. If they had asked for a more modest increase, I could engage with the argument.
	When I looked up the way in which the then Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Beverley Hughes), justified the extension from seven days to 14, I noticed that some of her reasons were remarkably similar to those cited in Metropolitan Assistant Commissioner Hayman's letter. The points about the need to study computers and technology were made almost word for word. I accept that other considerations have emerged since then and that there might be a case for extending the limit, but not to 90 days, for goodness' sake.
	Some Members have said that Lord Carlile endorses the proposal. I accept that he does so in his report, but not with any great enthusiasm. He does not endorse all the proposals in Assistant Commissioner Hayman's letter, and dismisses some of them explicitly:
	"I do not regard extra time for interviews as being a sound basis for the extension of the time period . . . the reality is that most suspects exercise their right to silence".

Chris Mullin: Indeed. That brings me to the point made by the right hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg). Courts may find it difficult to convict on the basis of admissions or accusations that emerge after 20, 30, 40 or 50 days in custody. That may be an unintended consequence of the measure and may lead to some people walking free who should not do so. I take no comfort in the safeguard that a district judge should approve detention at regular intervals. I have a little experience in this area and, in the past, many members of the judiciary, both senior and junior, have proved remarkably gullible in believing whatever nonsense was put before them by the Crown and, in some cases, by the police. The words "national security" have only to be breathed for some district judges, magistrates and even High Court judges to roll over and have their tummies tickled. With the best will in the world, it is difficult for a judge, however senior, to turn down a request from a Crown prosecutor who tells him that the detention order is essential and that the world could be blown up tomorrow unless he renews it.
	I remember a former Bow street stipendiary magistrate, a man of great experience, saying on his retirement that he could not recall a single instance in 30 years of a policeman in the witness box exaggerating in the slightest. I accept that things have changed a little, but that gives a flavour of the difficulties that we will encounter if we let district judges deal with the problem. The Home Secretary will concede that it must be a High Court judge at least. Indeed, that must be one of the concessions in my right hon. Friend's back pocket, and it would be nice if he conceded the point in the Commons rather than the other place.
	Some say that we should place our trust in experts, and that the experts who track down terrorists have a complex job, so we should listen to whatever advice they give us. I certainly listen with respect to anyone who has that difficult job, whether they are in the police or the security services, but I do not endorse blindly or automatically whatever they say, because in years gone by experts have been known to be spectacularly wrong in terrorism cases and other matters. In the mid 1970s—the situation then has a bearing on today's situation —they caught the wrong people for all the main terrorist bombings. A total of 18 people were wrongly arrested. Some of those experts and High Court judges still argue in private that all the people who were captured in the '70s were guilty. They are still in self-denial and labour under a massive illusion. My message is therefore, "Put not thy faith entirely in experts."
	I hope that we will not go down the American road.

Chris Mullin: Forgive me, I have only three minutes left.
	In many respects, the Americans have thrown away the rule book when it comes to dealing with terrorism. Some hon. Members will be familiar with the process of extraordinary rendition, whereby terror suspects are kidnapped and franchised out to countries where torture is routine. I do not want to see us starting out down that road. I do not suggest that it would ever happen in this country. I am sure that it will not, but it should be a warning to us.
	So, too, should the shooting of the unfortunate Brazilian gentleman in Stockwell tube station. I understand how these things happen. I well remember the atmosphere in which it took place, but when tensions are at their highest, that is the moment when we need to have safeguards in place. Was it not instructive that we subsequently learned that, the day after the shooting, the Metropolitan Commissioner had quietly written to the Home Secretary and asked that there be no independent inquiry into the shooting? The Home Secretary rightly rebuffed him. Indeed, the law requires that there be such an inquiry. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Commissioner, a man held in great respect is, relatively speaking, a liberal. If he would go down that road, one can only wonder how someone of a less liberal disposition would react in those circumstances.
	That emphasises the need for us always to be on our guard and to leave no loopholes in the law when it comes to inserting protections and making sure that they are watertight. I am in favour, as I said at the outset, of making the police and the security services as effective as possible in the fight against terrorism. I am not against some of the measures in the Bill, providing they can be justified, but there must be a bottom line. Although I might be persuaded to go along with a modest extension of the powers of detention, it will not be a very large one. We are making a mistake if we endorse the full 90 days or anything resembling it. Judging by the mood in the House tonight, I feel sure that the Government will want to compromise in the end. I look forward to that day.

Elfyn Llwyd: Many of us are nervous about the Bill because we have seen how the 2000 Act has been operating out in the field, so to speak. A cricketer on his way to a match was stopped at King's Cross and questioned under section 44 of that Act about his possession of a cricket bat. Police thought he might be travelling to Scotland to cause trouble at the G8 summit.
	Emily Flynn, a 24-year-old woman, was detained under section 44. She stated:
	"They questioned me, searched my bag, read my notebook, and threatened to take me inside to strip search me. 'You have to admit,' said officer 216738—who could legally withhold his name . . . 'that you couldn't be searched by a better looking bloke.'"
	She has no redress, apparently, after that incident.
	I speak on behalf of Plaid Cymru and also the Scottish National party. On clause 1, which deals with the encouragement of terrorism, we are concerned about the way in which the clause has been drafted. The requirement that the accused knew or believed or had reasonable grounds for believing that other members of the public were likely to understand it as a direct or indirect encouragement or other inducement to commit terrorist acts looks fairly reasonable, but it is not good enough. Without a more specific definition, the offence is likely to have unintended consequences, one of which, I can readily see, is the inhibition of free speech. Furthermore, it is unacceptable to create such a wide offence that will require reliance on the discretion of the prosecution as to its appropriate use.
	We have heard about the Cherie Blair and Jenny Tonge test. I will not go over that again, but suffice it to say that many worthy causes—and, I regret to say, many hon. Members—will be outlawed if the Bill goes through in its current state. The law must be accessible, and those affected by it must know exactly what it prohibits. That must be formulated with clarity, so that those affected understand it and regulate their conduct according to the law.

Elfyn Llwyd: The right hon. Gentleman is spot on, and I know he gains support from throughout the House for what he has just said.
	The dangers of allowing clause 1 to continue unamended stem from its broadness and vagueness of definition, the lack of any intent, as the right hon. Gentleman said and the lack of any sense of the certainty essential to a fair and credible criminal justice system. People will be unaware of the consequences of their actions, as he said and have no control over how their words or publications might be interpreted even. We are on very dangerous ground at the moment. Liberty, for example, believes that this offence is totally unnecessary anyway, because there is sufficient criminal law allowing prosecution of those who incite terrorism, a point that the right hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) made well earlier. If there is to be any new offence—I do not believe that there should be one—it must have at its core the element of intent.
	Furthermore, as the right hon. and learned Gentleman said, anyone arguing for deposing brutal dictators anywhere in the world at any time would be guilty of a breach of clause 1. If this offence had been on the statute book a few years ago, it would have caught dissidents against Saddam, and it would certainly catch anyone calling for the deposition of Robert Mugabe.

Elfyn Llwyd: The hon. Gentleman makes that point extremely well, but what is insidious is that even support for that kind of action will be criminalised in this country, and he and I and others may find ourselves before the courts in short order.
	Clause 8 relates to being present at a camp where terrorism training is taking place. That again is a difficult matter. I am sure that no sensible person would find themselves in such a camp, but again in that instance there is no actus reus and no mens rea; it becomes an absolute offence. A person in such a camp might be a bit slow on the uptake and not have picked up on what was going on, but if one is there for whatever reason, that is it—seven years, thank you very much. Again, that is extremely dangerous ground. Will we be breeding terrorists rather than inhibiting them by going along this particular road?
	An offence is created by just being in a place at the wrong time, with no intention whatever. It is guilt by association. That can never have any place in the law of England and Wales, and it should never have any place at all. Clause 8 will undoubtedly breach article 6 of the human rights convention, and it is impossible to see how such a principle could sensibly form the basis of new criminal law in the UK.
	All Members have been concerned with clause 23, which extends the period of detention. As the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) observed, there has never been a case where anybody has been held for longer than 14 days, so why do we need 90? Why not make it 190, or 300, while we are at it? The whole thing is ridiculous. The first question is whether we need an extension. My view is firmly that we do not, but let us be reasonable and open to argument in deciding whether to agree to some form of abridgement.
	I am not at all happy with a district judge reviewing the process, because some are prone to accepting one version of the facts and one only. I am not even sure about the nature of the review. Will the detained be represented? Will they know what is being said in those proceedings in camera? Is the detained entitled to be represented, or are we to have another Special Immigration Appeals Commission situation in which absolute balderdash is dished out before the court and nobody has a chance to challenge or even evaluate what is being said?

Robert Wareing: No Member of this House would in any way deplore measures to prevent terrorism occurring in our country. One of the reasons why many of us voted against the war in Iraq was that we realised that it would make our country even more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. In my view, the Bill is an excellent example of legislation that has been introduced in a knee-jerk reaction.
	The Government have to show that they are macho about the terrorist threat. We have heard assurances from the Home Secretary that the 90 day-detention provision and the other clauses will be used only against suspected terrorists. However, we heard those assurances when the Terrorism Act 2000 was considered, but they did not prevent the arrest of Walter Wolfgang, after he had been removed by thugs from the Labour party conference, under—believe it or not—the Terrorism Act. A refugee from Nazi oppression was arrested under the Terrorism Act. I am not therefore comforted by the assurances that we have been given this afternoon.
	Cherie Blair's statement has been mentioned several times. I signed the early-day motion to defend her from attacks in the press. If the Bill had been law and we had expressed that view in the country, we might have been affected by its provisions. It is no use people shaking their heads. I have visited the west bank and seen the oppression under which the Palestinian people live. I can understand why there have been suicide bombers there, although I do not understand it in this country. Let us imagine that a radical Palestinian heard a statement by Cherie Blair or Jenny Tonge. He might become even more radical. I am sure that it could be proved that statements by people from this country tipped the scales so that a person became militant and involved in the terrorist acts that we all deplore. That could apply to the statements that I mentioned.
	The Bill contains much that is objectionable and much that I appreciate. However, it includes little that is not already covered in statute or common law. The means for tackling the terrorist threat already exists. Indeed, the Government have been successful in dealing with extremist clerics, although they have some difficulty in deporting them, but that is another matter. They have done all that they could to deal with those who were rightly arrested because of their blatant statements, which were a spur to terrorists.
	Let us imagine that the Bill had been on the statute book some years ago, during the Thatcher Administration, when the Prime Minister expressed support for Pinochet and described Nelson Mandela as a terrorist. Many of us went on the streets to support Nelson Mandela and the fight against apartheid. I was the chairman of the Merseyside committee for solidarity with Chile after that other 9/11 in 1973. If the Bill had been law, perhaps we would have been in prison. Let us picture the situation: Cherie Blair in prison, me in prison, and, if her husband had come out in her support, I might have shared a cell with the Prime Minister. Heaven forbid, but it might have been possible.
	One of the great difficulties with the Bill is its lack of a definition of terrorism. Many hon. Members have alluded to that, but I believe that the definition given to terrorism is whatever the Government of the day believe terrorism to be. The Thatcher Administration thought that it was terrorism to attack the Pinochet regime or apartheid South Africa.
	I do not know what the Government consider to be terrorism. I am sure that they do not believe that tackling terrorism includes getting rid of an 82-year-old man at the Labour party conference. They do not really believe that, do they? Could not the legislation also have been used against the Greenham Common women? Were they terrorists? If someone at a CND demonstration leaves the rest of the crowd and tries to cut through the wire fence to get into an American air force base, is that terrorism? Such people could be pursued under this Bill.
	I realise that the 90-day detention is an important issue, but I do not want to go into the details of the proposal because many people have already done so. I am of course opposed to it. I note that the Conservatives have also expressed their opposition to that part of the Bill. On Second Reading, we vote on the principle of a Bill, and that provision forms part of the principle of this Bill. I see no reason for the Conservative Opposition to go along with the Government on this. It does not make sense.

Peter Robinson: The hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) was a little unkind to the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) when he damned him for the grave offence of offering some measure of support to the Government whom we assumed the hon. Member for Sunderland, South supported. The reality is that even the hon. Member for Stone had some misgivings about elements of the Bill.
	No one in the House today—not even the Home Secretary—wants to have to deal with this kind of legislation. However, we do not find ourselves in the circumstances that we would like to be in, and we have to deal with the circumstances as they are. The former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy), rightly said that the Government had two competing duties. The first is their duty to protect the lives of the citizens of this kingdom; the second is their duty to protect those people's liberties. Because that tension exists between the two duties, the Government have to strike a balance. Most of today's debate has been about determining the point at which the balance should be struck.
	I said in an earlier intervention that I was struggling with one issue. In fact, there are two. First, the Home Secretary indicated that he was considering the issue of definitions, particularly in relation to the glorification of terrorism, and I hope that progress will be made on that in Committee—progress must be made, as the current position is unworkable.
	Secondly, in relation to the 90-day issue, I intervened on the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) in the hope of drawing out some answer to the problem that I faced. The Home Secretary has made a strong case as to why additional time in detention is necessary. We are dealing with a new world, with different technologies. The proliferation of CCTV across the United Kingdom is such that when an incident occurs, the investigating authorities can view it from various standpoints and gather information. The issue of computers was mentioned, and it was not adequately dealt with by the shadow Home Secretary's answer that although it might take time to get around the problem of encryption, a suspect who withholds information should be charged and could be held on that charge. The reality might be different. Three people might be responsible for what was intended to be a series of suicide bombings, two of whom might have given up their lives in the process. Those two might be the ones responsible for the encryption, and no matter what legal redress one might have against the remaining person, he could not decode the files even if he wanted to. That is one of a series of different possibilities that would prevent such a solution.

Peter Robinson: I imagine that the shadow Home Secretary's argument is that that would be the holding charge in the first instance. That was much the argument of the Liberal Democrat spokesman, who said that he had the answer to the 90-day problem: if people were brought in on suspicion of responsibility for some terrorist incident, some lesser charger should be made against them. I do not like that option, because, in effect, we would be giving the police a wink and a nod to concoct some holding charge in order to keep the suspect in custody. That is a worse set of circumstances, because the police are unlikely to withdraw that charge later, whereas if they find, as the Home Secretary suggests, that the person is not of value to them, they can be released. They will end up being charged with what might be, in Northern Ireland language, the duff charge. I have not heard today the answer to the conundrum of how we overcome the problems associated with the longer detention period.
	While I said that the Home Secretary had convinced me that a longer detention period was needed, he has not convinced me that 90 days is the right period and, to be fair to him, he has not tried to convince me of that. We need some evidence as to why those 90 days are necessary. I would have thought that the provision of as short a detention period as possible is in the interests of anyone who loves liberty. Certain arguments have been advanced, and some thought that they would poke fun at the Labour Member who suggested that because the 14 days had not been exceeded, there should be no concern about a 90-day detention period. The reality is that the police will work within whatever length of time might be available to them.

Graham Stuart: If there is another atrocity, the red-top papers will call for blood, and the police will want to show that they are taking action. Is there not a danger that they will trawl the friends or associates of anyone who they believe may have been involved, and that as a result such people will spend a long time in custody? People who have committed no offence may be convicted as if they had committed an offence that would normally carry six months' imprisonment.

Andrew Dismore: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. If I had my normal Friday length of time to speak, I would happily give way, but unfortunately I do not.
	People have questioned why the police need an extension of their powers, but Mr. Clarke provided two very good examples. The brief that we have received from the police so far refers in general terms to the ricin plot. However, Mr. Clarke told us that
	"had we had this provision in 2002, the outcome of a recent court case, the so-called ricin trial, might have been very different. Mohamed Meguerba was one of the suspects in that case and it is likely that we would have held him or applied for his detention for sufficient time to find that his fingerprints were on the ricin recipe and he would have stood trial as a main conspirator in that case had he not fled the country. As it was, he was not available to stand trial".
	Basically, he did a runner and the police had no ability to hold him, although his fingerprints were there.
	Mr. Clarke provided another useful example of a current case in which the police found—by chance on the 13th day of detention—crucial evidence on a computer, which led to the authorisation of charges from the Director of Public Prosecutions. The inference was clear—that if the computer had not been decrypted until the 15th day, the particular individual could have walked and probably done a runner. Mr. Clarke made it absolutely clear how much pressure is on the police, when he told us that officers are often
	"sleeping on the floor . . . just ploughing their way through this vast amount of data."
	The police, he told us, would like to see
	"criminal investigations . . . conducted in a slightly calmer and more ordered atmosphere than that."
	Many other examples and explanations are given in the evidence, fleshing out the views expressed by assistant commissioner Hayman. I strongly suggest that hon. Members read that evidence, as it answers many of the points that have been raised in the debate. If hon. Members have an open mind—I suspect that many do not, but should—they will find that evidence to be significant. I was certainly sceptical before I heard the police, but adjusted my views after hearing them.
	Searches of domestic dwellings that the police have to conduct were another example, as was the length of time required to decrypt SIM cards. Obtaining evidence from overseas was another instance of where it could take the police a very long time. It is not, as some hon. Members have suggested, a question of resources. Mr. Clarke clearly said:
	"It is not about resources".
	Rather, it was the "sheer weight of material" that needed to be analysed, focused into an interview strategy and then into an investigation strategy by the senior officer. "At some point", he said,
	"one person has to be aware of what is emerging from all this data. It cannot just be a cavalry charge."
	Some have mentioned lesser charges, but Mr. Jones made it clear that they are often not possible and he mentioned the risk of bail. In those circumstances, it would often not be possible to proceed.
	I was very pleased to hear that the police welcomed judicial oversight of the process. They do not want everything to remain in the hands of the police, but approve of "robust judicial oversight" to ensure as much transparency as possible. They cited some cases where district judges had not given the police what they had asked for. Mr. Clarke said:
	"It is very often the case that we will ask for perhaps four or five days and the district judge will say, 'No, 48 hours and then I want to hear the case again.'"
	That is a frequent occurrence, we were told. He also said that before the police can go to court and ask for a warrant, they often have to
	"think very carefully about it and . . . consult the Crown Prosecution Service as to whether it is an appropriate course of action."
	Having said that, I certainly agree with the conclusions of Lord Carlile that further safeguards are required. I agree that a more senior judge would be appropriate in the circumstances. Personally, I think that the best way forward is to work towards an investigating judge system—copying the continental European system—where a judge is in charge of an investigation, gives directions and views the evidence. I believe that having a system of specialist prosecutors with specialist judges working together will provide valuable safeguards. I hope that my Committee will look further into that option in the future.
	Three months may or may not be the right period for the extension, but the police have certainly made a very cogent case—they certainly did to my Committee. Many of us who heard the evidence last Monday were initially sceptical, but are now less so. For those reasons, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I shall support the Government tonight.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I remind the House that only about 50 minutes remain before the winding-up speeches are due to begin. Sixteen hon. Members are still seeking to catch my eye, so it is not going to be easy to find time for them all. I call Mr. James Clappison.

James Clappison: The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Mr. Wareing) suggested that the Home Secretary was trying to show with this Bill that he was macho. I believe that it was Mae West who said that, in her experience, men who were macho were not up to mucho, but I think that I can be fairer than that to the right hon. Gentleman.
	I fear that I am in danger of fitting the description given by the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), and of being the third hon. Member to speak in this debate to express explicit sympathy for the Home Secretary. I find myself in a great deal of agreement with my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), and with the hon. Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson), who speaks on behalf of the Democratic Unionist party. He has as much experience of these matters as anyone in the House, and we should listen to the sentiments that he expresses.
	That is not to say that we need not be vigilant in considering this Bill, which has been proposed in response to extreme events. We must always be vigilant in respect of legislation conceived in those circumstances. Moreover, the Bill comes hard on the heels of other terrorism legislation that may affect civil liberties, and we must also take into account the deeply flawed Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which is passing through the House of Lords at present. All of that combines to give this Government a somewhat dubious record on civil liberties. Yet I find that, this evening, I will be passing through the same Lobby as those hon. Members who support the Government. That is because I think that, on the whole, this Bill is worth having, although it clearly needs a great deal of scrutiny. Two of its provisions, in particular, will need to be changed.
	Questions have been asked as to whether all of the Bill is necessary, or whether it is merely a repetition of existing offences. However, I find it hard to see any objection in principle to spelling out the law in relation to the preparation of terrorist acts, to training for terrorism acts, and to the attendance at a place used for terrorist training. Those offences need to be spelled out.
	I very much welcome the proposals for the proscription of terrorist organisations. I strongly agree with the general sentiments expressed by the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee. He made the valuable and powerful point that there are many things besides passing legislation that we must do to reach out to the hearts and minds of those communities in this country that we need to influence. I disagree with him, however, in respect of Hizb ut-Tahrir. That organisation is more than just a vehicle for eccentric views at the extreme of the political spectrum. Throughout Europe, it has a record of publishing vicious and violent—and often violently anti-Semitic—propaganda. From time to time, it may seek to cloak itself in the guise of peaceful debate, but at other times it expresses hateful and hurtful opinions.
	I want to turn briefly to two aspects of the Bill that have attracted particular attention. Some of the problems associated with the offence of glorifying terrorism in clause 1—it was originally clause 2—have been ironed out as a result of the welcome concession that the Home Secretary has made, particularly in respect of the need for intent in the offence. Much more needs to be done, however, and matters as they stand are not satisfactory. That much was demonstrated by the interventions in the right hon. Gentleman's speech from hon. Members of all parties.
	We understand what the Home Secretary is trying to get at with the proposed offence but, although he may hit that particular target, I am afraid that he may hit too many other targets as well. In seeking to address the problem that he has identified, he is in danger of criminalising statements that should be part of normal political debate. For example, the right hon. Gentleman was not able to deal satisfactory with suggestions from various hon. Members that expressions of opinion about Zimbabwe or North Korea, railway lines in Burma or statues in Uzbekistan would be criminalised by the Bill. That needs to be looked at again.
	Following the interventions that he accepted, the Home Secretary's final position was that he hoped that the provision would not have the effect that had been described, but I do not see why that should be so. For me, it remains possible that expressions of opinion of the type that I have described would be caught by the Bill. Therefore, I hope that there will be some movement in that respect.
	I turn next to the length of detention before charge—a very serious feature of the Bill, which we need to deal with very seriously. When the anti-terrorist branch of the Metropolitan police makes a request for an extension of the period of detention permitted before charge, we must give it serious and sympathetic consideration. It is not a question of our doing automatically what the police request of us. The fact that the police have made such a request is surely not a reason for turning it down out of hand, and we must give it serious consideration.
	We are all aware of the fact that grave issues of public safety are at stake, as the letter from Mr. Hayman makes clear. We have to accept that we are facing a terrorist threat of a different order from that in the past—a threat which can have appalling consequences—and we must listen to the police when they tell us that they need therefore to intervene earlier to protect the public.
	Against that background we must give the proposals serious consideration. We should remember that Lord Carlile has broadly given them his approval, but we should also remember that a massive extension of the present maximum is proposed, that the present maximum was itself a very substantial increase—a doubling—on the previous limit, and that that increase was allowed only as recently as January last year.
	As others have rightly pointed out, when the change from seven to 14 days' detention without charge was made, all the matters that Mr. Hayman mentioned in his letter must have been apparent. The police must have been aware of these matters; we should have been aware of these matters. There is nothing in the letter that tells us something about international terrorism of which we were not aware when the previous legislation was passed. We must have known about those matters then, and we should take that into account as well.
	Although in balancing liberty against public safety I am not prepared without hearing more to concede what the police are asking for, I am certainly not prepared to turn their request down out of hand. I therefore hope that we shall give the matter very serious consideration in Committee and try to do the best that we can to balance public safety against the fundamental civil liberty of not being detained for an unreasonable length of time without charge.
	I am not convinced by the course proposed by the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) on behalf of the Liberal Democrats—that of charging the person concerned with a lesser charge and then questioning them—because I fail to see just how many of the rights of the accused person would be preserved. The person would definitely face a lesser charge, and may face a more serious charge later. In the meantime the police could continue to question him. All the points made by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) about questioning someone for a long time when they are held in detention not knowing their ultimate fate must apply with as much force to the hon. Gentleman's proposal as they do to the Government's. I recoil from the concept of charging someone with a lesser charge rather than the full charge; they should face the full charge at the earliest possible opportunity. So, there are problems with those provisions.
	Problems also arise from the operation of the Bail Act 1976. When a person is charged, they are brought before a court, as is their right, but from the point of view of bail the court will deal with them with the lesser charge in mind, and the decision on bail may well go in the person's favour when the police are still investigating them for very serious matters. So I do not think that the hon. Member for Winchester has the answer; he needs to do more thinking.
	We all need to approach this issue seriously and to give it very serious consideration. We should not adopt inflexible attitudes at this point. We should be prepared to make concessions on all sides and to strive for a spirit of consensus; to listen carefully to the reasoned arguments on both sides; and to give very serious consideration to our duty both to defend civil liberties and to protect our fellow citizens and ensure public safety.

Greg Mulholland: I thank the hon. Gentleman for the way that we were able to work together as two of the hon. Members whose constituencies were affected by what happened in the summer, but I want to ask him a direct question. Does he not agree that there is real concern in Muslim communities above all specifically about clause 23 on extending the period of detention to 90 days? Is that not a real problem?

Richard Burden: No. I said exactly what I meant. I condemn anyone who advocates the blowing-up of buses or any attack on civilians. The Bill, however, does not just include such acts but any act of political violence. As I said, I am worried that someone could be locked up for suggesting that Palestinian political violence is justified. We should debate that, as only a few weeks ago an Israeli general accused of war crimes—whether justifiably or not, I do not know—was discreetly spirited out of the UK to avoid an arrest warrant. There have even been rumours of unofficial diplomatic apologies to Israel for any embarrassment that may have been caused.
	I am not condoning in any way the use of terrorist violence in the west bank or Gaza. Indeed, I spend a great deal of time arguing with people who do so because I think that such arguments are a worthwhile exercise. I am told that conversations that others and I have had may have played a part, albeit a small one, in helping to achieve certain ceasefires. But what the Bill tells me is that there is no place for that kind of dialogue. It asks me as a legislator to criminalise someone not for committing the act of violence, but for offering an opinion that may seek to justify it. By banning things or outlawing them, one will not necessarily stop them.
	If one talks to people who know about the dynamics of different forms of political Islam, they will say, and have said in meetings in this place, that the danger of clause 1 and related clauses—my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) put it very well—is that they will end up grouping together those who support the use of violence to achieve limited political aims, even if I do not agree with those political aims, because they believe, perhaps wrongly, that there is no alternative, with those whose perverted and apocalyptic view of the world sees some kind of Zionist-crusader conspiracy as the root of all evil, and who say that any kind of slaughter anywhere in the world is justified to confront that supposed conspiracy.
	Are we more likely to save one more innocent life by lumping those two political outlooks together, or are we more likely to save lives if we are prepared to distinguish between them—between those whom we might just stand a chance of diverting from the path of violence, and those whom we simply have to fight? Those who incite, organise or commit the kind of atrocities that London experienced in July should be held to account for those crimes, but we also have a responsibility to try to help prevent similar atrocities from taking place in other countries.
	I realise that the argument that I am advancing may be unfashionable in some quarters. I am sure it would be unfashionable in the neo con world of US Patriot Acts or the easy division of the world into goodies and baddies, usually defined as goodies being "us", and baddies being "them". However, we also need to tackle the complex web of causes of grievances that end up leading—yes—even to the slaughter of civilians, whether by Governments, which I would condemn, or by terrorist groups, which I would equally condemn.
	We are in danger of making matters worse if we introduce laws that are so open-ended that they outlaw debate, even an uncomfortable debate, or are applied so selectively that they seem to be targeted on only one section of our community. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) should realise that under the definitions in the Bill, if I, or anybody else, sought to justify Palestinian political violence, I would be caught by the Bill. If somebody stood up in the House and sought to justify the bulldozing of a Palestinian home suspected of harbouring terrorists by the Israeli army, they would be also be committing an offence under the Bill.
	In dealing with the problems in the middle east and working out how we can most effectively contribute to a just peace there, we can do rather better than trying to lock each other up because we happen to hold one view or another view. That is why I am profoundly worried about the first part of the Bill and related clauses. The Government will not get my support tonight. I may not vote against the Bill, but they will not get my support. I hope they will listen to the arguments and rethink the clause before Committee and Report, because it will do nothing to defeat the causes of terrorism, which is what we should aim to do.

Tobias Ellwood: I was looking forward to hearing the Government's plans for dealing with international terrorism. I take a personal interest in the subject, having lost my brother in the Bali bombing, as the House may be aware. I am concerned, however, about what is in the Bill, what is not in the Bill, and what is part of an entire strategy that the Government should be putting together to deal with an international issue, not a local issue.
	The Bill is supposed to be the cornerstone of how we deal with international terrorism. How would it or could it have prevented the bomb that went off on 7 July?
	I do not understand why we are not addressing the fundamental issue of why British citizens decide to kill other British citizens. The Bill does not address that and I should like the Minister to comment on that.
	Time is limited and others wish to speak, but I want to focus on two issues that concern the international scene. We understand that no matter how much legislation we create in this House or anywhere else, it is virtually impossible to stop an attack taking place. However, I have spoken to the survivors and the families of the victims of the Bali, Turkey and Sharm el-Sheikh disasters, and there is a frustration that the energy and determination that has been expended to fight terrorism here in the UK is not matched by other countries around the world. That is reflected in the fact that a second bomb has gone off in Bali. Bali itself, or Indonesia, has yet to condemn—to outlaw—Jemaah Islamiah the terrorist group responsible for the first and second bombings. Those countries need our help and support, and if we are to have a strategy to deal with international terrorism, we should be at the forefront of helping such countries, whether they be in the middle east, Indonesia, Afghanistan or Pakistan.
	The other concern that has been expressed is that the energy and determination to prevent a bomb going off in the first place is not matched by the commitment and support to the victims. With regard to compensation, will the Minister update us on the position regarding those affected by 7 July. There is also a recognition that terrorism knows no borders, and neither should our support for British citizens, no matter where the bombs take place. Yet, because the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority refuses to acknowledge any events that take place abroad, although people in Bali, Turkey and elsewhere have been killed by the same terrorist organisations, they do not get a penny in compensation from the Government.
	Terrorism is unlikely to disappear. In fact, it is likely to get worse with the use of nuclear, possibly biological and perhaps chemical weapons as well. If the Bill is supposed to be the platform to contain, stop and eradicate terrorism, I find it wanting. We need to give more help to those people where the blanket of security that we are trying to create is failing. We face the challenge of breaking down the religious divide that these terrorists are trying to widen not only here in the UK but in other parts of the world.
	There is little in the Bill to prevent the conveyor belt of the disillusioned being recruited by the terrorist. We could be doing much more not only in the House but as a nation and on the international scene to improve our prospects in fighting the battle against terrorism.

Mark Hendrick: The 20th century was a century where this country had to deal with the challenges faced by the "isms" of communism and fascism. The people of this country were threatened by evil ideologies from abroad that were totalitarian in nature and that threatened the country with the conventional military might of armies, air forces and navies.
	In the 2lst century, we must deal with the challenges of globalisation and terrorism. Some months ago, I might have said international and global terrorism, but since 7 July, the fact that we witnessed here in London terrorist acts perpetrated by British citizens has moved the goalposts, and as the Prime Minister put it, the rules must change. The threat that we face is totalitarian in nature, but guerrilla-like in its methods.
	Again we face an evil ideology from abroad, a perverse extremist form of Islam. It is as extreme and perverse as some of the right-wing white supremacist sects in the United States, but it is one that has now chosen to wage war with any religious or racial group that does not follow its teachings.
	The hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), with whose views I often disagree, particularly on Europe, was the first hon. Member, despite the hours of debate, to describe this as a war. Al-Qaeda is waging a war on secularism, tolerance, and racial and religious harmony. It is waging a war on Muslims in Iraq as well as on the people of all faiths and races from places as far apart as New York and Bali and as near as Madrid and London.
	The world in which we live is changing by the day. Affordable international air travel, the internet and even digital mobile phone technology have become the means of delivery of the poison of these people's ideology or the power of their explosives. The threat had to be faced and I believe that the Bill is part of the developing armoury of legislation that must be deployed to counter the threat and provide for a more secure Britain.
	Today's British society recognises the need for this legislation. Some civil liberties groups, Opposition Members and colleagues have genuine reservations about parts of the Bill, but I have none. Since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, we have had the benign 1990s. Britain, and Europe in general, with the exception of the Balkans, have enjoyed relative peace and stability. Until 11 September 2001, we had come to expect economic growth, high employment, low interest rates and modern creature comforts as things that we all deserved, and the vast majority of people had hopes, expectations and a general feeling of security.
	Today, however, people have fears as well as aspirations because of the nature of the threat that we face. The Bill deals with those threats in a balanced and reasonable way that is a large step in the right direction. In order to stop the spread of this poisonous ideology, the glorification of terrorism is be outlawed, as is praising or celebrating terrorist acts. Good, I say.

Mark Hendrick: My hon. Friend did hear me correctly, and if he will allow me to continue he will find out why.
	Some Members have said, "What about praising the ANC or movements in Palestine, Burma or elsewhere in the world?" It is clearly justifiable to support, praise and celebrate the aims and objectives of many such movements, particularly when they are oppressed by regimes that deny them their land, liberty and freedom of speech, without necessarily supporting all their methods in trying to achieve those aims and objectives. I want a stable and secure Palestine based on the 1967 boundaries, but I would never praise or celebrate the terrorist methods of Hamas or the former atrocities of the PLO. If oppressed opposition groups in countries around the world who have just cause choose to resort to terrorist methods because they have lost their land, liberty and freedom and have no vote, I would not celebrate, support or try to justify those terrorist actions.
	That is not to say that if change occurs in a country as a result of the use of terrorist methods, I would not accept that the new regime may—or in some cases may not—be better than the old one. I would not seek to justify the means by which it has gained power, but be content with the outcome. I have never believed that the ends justify the means. In a situation where a regime is persecuting people, self-defence is legitimate. Wars or UN resolutions-based actions against regimes are legitimate. As for what remains on the consciences of people in other countries in determining how they attain their freedom, I, and for that matter many Governments, have little power over that. However, where there are interventions and military actions such as in Afghanistan and Iraq—conflicts where genocide has been averted—and conflicts that involve the UN, we can hold a view that celebrates and justifies armed struggle against the oppressors, and would justifiably not describe actions against the regime in question as terrorism.
	Let us say that the tube train that exploded in an underground tunnel on 7 July was activated by a timing device left by someone who had left the train instead of a suicide bomber, and that the suspected bomber had later been apprehended by the police. It could take months to acquire the forensic evidence to convict the suspect, as the tunnel could have completely collapsed, with a risk to rescue workers similar to that which we saw on 7 July. Finding a fingerprint on something left by the bomber would be like finding a needle in a haystack and would take longer than two weeks.
	The stakes are now so high that half measures will not do. The nation looks to us to safeguard its security. If the Bill is not passed in something that relates to its current form and—God forbid—another atrocity on the scale of 7 July occurs because a detained suspect is released after a few weeks, despite the fact that he remains under suspicion on good intelligence grounds, we would have to live with that knowledge for the rest of our lives.

Dominic Grieve: The debate has been fascinating, especially because of the range of views that have been expressed and the lack of certainty about the direction from which a different view would be voiced. It must be apparent to the Government that they face a major challenge over the Bill. The tenor of the contributions show that many hon. Members feel the most serious disquiet about the impact of the proposed legislation on civil liberties in this country.

Dominic Grieve: As drafted, the clause presents precisely those difficulties. While I have some sympathy with the Government in trying to consider the issue of terrorism generally, the fact is that the definition provided is hopeless to meet the problems for which we must legislate. Furthermore, as has been highlighted, clause 1, in relation to incitement, provides for an offence that can be committed negligently, not an offence of specific intent. Therefore, when those two factors are taken together, a very large number of people in this country are likely to be criminalised for their comments.
	Let me make one thing clear to the Government: the suggestion that it does not matter that the legislation is woolly, because either the DPP or the Attorney-General will act as a long stop to prevent something wrong happening, is just not acceptable. The task of this House is to pass legislation that is intellectually coherent and intelligible, not to give a blank cheque to the Government, which they can exercise through the Law Officers or anyone else at their whim.
	We do not think that the offence of glorification should be in the Bill at all. I know that it was even worse in the first draft of the Bill, and I am grateful that the Home Secretary seems to have persuaded the Prime Minister to give way on the matter. One is left with the impression, however, that it has been left in the Bill specifically to save the Prime Minister's face. That is not acceptable either. Either glorification amounts to incitement of its own, or it does not amount to incitement at all. If it does not amount to incitement at all, there is no reason why it should be separately identified within the legislation. The sooner that we have an assurance from the Government that it will be removed, the better progress we will make during the passage of the Bill.
	The second issue that has greatly exercised the House is that of the 90-day detention period. As I said a moment ago, there are ways in which we believe that the issue can be considered afresh. There are a number of possibilities. We certainly need much better scrutiny, as was suggested by Lord Carlile. The decisions should be taken by a senior circuit judge and not by a district judge, to which we shall return in Committee. There should be a review mechanism and an appeal process to the High Court, and I am dubious that seven-day periods are acceptable, because the judge should decide the period before a return, and the only basis for any continuing detention would have to be persuading the judge that there is a reason, in the next three, four or 72 hours, that that detention will yield benefit.
	It is also astonishing that one of the provisions under the detention clause is that detention can take place in order to facilitate continuing questioning and nothing else. One moment's thought must make the Government realise that that is an unacceptable premise. In fact, any confession that is obtained will probably be thrown out by the court. The atmosphere of oppression that will be conveyed—that somebody can be detained specifically for the purpose of questioning and interrogation on its own—is one that is readily curable.
	Although I have no difficulty in agreeing with large parts of the Bill, much of it is very sloppily drafted. In relation to the dissemination of terrorist literature and publications, are we seriously saying that the offence will be so widely drafted that a university lecturer handing out copies of an al-Qaeda manifesto to his students would be caught by the operation of the Act? The Home Secretary shakes his head, but as drafted, that is precisely what the legislation does.
	There is much to criticise, but there is a kernel in the Bill that seeks to improve anti-terrorist powers. We accept that, which is why, in principle, we are prepared to support the Government. We are also mindful that the Government have provided a proper opportunity for the House to consider the legislation, in Committee of the whole House, a proper Report stage thereafter, and most importantly of all, a Third Reading that will be more than a 45-minute rubber stamp.
	For those reasons, let me first thank the Home Secretary and secondly say that we intend to engage in a constructive dialogue. However, I also ask the Home Secretary not to end this process by saying that amendments will be tabled in another place. Either the Bill is in an acceptable condition by the time of Third Reading or it will not have our support, and—according to my impression—will not have the support of many Members in all parts of the House.
	The challenge is with the Government. We intend to work co-operatively with the Home Secretary, but I must tell him that there is a great mountain to be climbed before the Bill is in an acceptable condition.

Hazel Blears: I absolutely believe that we have learnt the lessons. Of course we must have safeguards in our legislation, but we must also have legislation that gives us the necessary powers to disrupt terrorism, to prosecute more terrorists, and to bring terrorists to justice within a proper legal system and according to the rule of law.
	The Bill contains much that is good, but inevitably today's debate has focused on the clause 1 offence of encouragement to commit terrorism and the extension of the maximum period of detention in clause 23. I emphasise "maximum period of detention". I shall respond to as many points as possible, but I shall not be able to deal with all of them. We shall have a good opportunity to debate them in Committee.
	The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) said that we should scrutinise the Bill and that there should be challenges, scepticism and questioning. That is what the House is good at, and I think that we will end up with legislation that is practical and effective. My right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy)—I pay tribute to his extensive experience in Northern Ireland—said that the events of 7 July were unprecedented in our country. Like many other Members, he recognises that the terrorist threat that we face now is significantly different from the Irish threat in many ways. I agreed with his sensible and practical observations.
	I was grateful to the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) for his acknowledgment of the way in which we have approached the issue. We are trying to secure consensus. I am disappointed that the hon. Gentleman and his party are to vote against Second Reading, because I genuinely do not believe that that is the right approach. If the hon. Gentleman is worried about clause 1 and the extension of the period of detention, he can debate those matters in Committee. The Bill contains a range of measures that will protect the people of this country.
	The hon. Member for Winchester said that in his view, there are alternatives to the 90-day limit that will work. We will explore them in Committee, but I point out to him now that the idea of charging suspects with a lesser offence has some serious faults. First, it is dishonest. Charging somebody with a minor offence simply as a ruse to keep them in custody is not the right thing to do. Secondly, it might not work. In order to get the evidence for the lesser offence, it might be necessary to decrypt a computer, which would take longer than the period in question in any event. Such an approach could also be inefficient and divert police resources toward dealing with minor offences, when they should be concentrating on the major offences in question. Indeed, such an approach could prove dangerous. Someone could be let out on bail because they were charged with a lesser offence, and then commit further offences. However, we will explore all those issues in Committee.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central (Tony Lloyd) raised issues relating to the offence of glorifying and encouraging of terrorism. I point out to all Members that if we seek to make a distinction between good terrorism and bad terrorism, we will get into very dangerous territory. Terrorism is wrong. We should not encourage people to kill, murder and maim others, even in the interest of political change. That will prove a really important dividing line as we continue our discussions.

Hazel Blears: Yes, and my hon. Friend puts the point extremely well. This Bill is about saying that terrorism, wherever it occurs, is wrong. People should not murder, maim and kill others in any context.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) made the absolutely valid point that legislation alone will not resolve the problems that we face. It is about winning hearts and minds, good policing, effective community relationships and better intelligence. But I say to him and to my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central that we need to think very carefully about this issue. If we are to limit terrorist offences simply to civilians, will that suggest that it is legitimate to attack police officers and innocent members of the armed forces? That is a very difficult distinction to make, but we will explore it in Committee.
	The hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) made his usual passionate speech on this issue; he will doubtless participate in our subsequent debate. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary should have allowed the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) to intervene. He spoke in favour of the Bill, and I was grateful for his emphasis on ensuring that our measures are proportionate to the threat that we face.
	I was disappointed by the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin)—he is not in his place, but he apologised to me in advance for his absence—made about the police. He said that if they could use a longer detention period, they might sit on the records for 30 or 40 days. If he had personal knowledge of the work that the police have done since 7 July—of the effort that they have put into the investigations, and the thousands of hours of CCTV footage that they have examined—he would realise that they are not likely to sit on documents for that long a period without taking action. Of course they are keen to minimise the detention period.
	I welcome the support of the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) for the Bill's provisions. He has some concerns, and I am sure that we will debate them in Committee. My hon. Friends the Members for Dewsbury (Mr. Malik) and for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) made extremely good speeches. I am particularly grateful for the action of my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury in supporting his local community and for the stand that he has taken on these issues, sometimes in difficult circumstances.
	I welcome the support of the hon. Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson) for the measures in the Bill and I look forward to debating it further with him.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, who is now Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, has looked at these issues in great detail and I welcome what he said about the Bill representing a proportionate response in human rights terms. I greatly welcome his support.
	The hon. Member for Leeds, North-West (Greg Mulholland) made a telling contribution about his shock at the events of 7 July. I have been out on many visits to the Muslim community across the country, including Leeds, and I found some excellent work going on to bring people together to face the threat.
	I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) about the importance of keeping engaged with young people. Together with the Muslim community, there are now seven groups working with women and young people to tackle extremism, and seeking to secure the support of imams and mosques. I have to say that the young people have probably formed the most exciting working group so far, which has come out with some excellent suggestions about road shows and how they can work to tackle extremism. I am delighted about that.
	The hon. Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood) rightly raised international issues. I can tell him that our international strategy is acknowledged as one of the best, and we intend to continue to support other countries in fighting terrorism.
	Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mr. Hendrick) set out, in an excellent speech, how the world is changing and how the terrorists threaten everything that we believe in. I welcome his support for the Bill.
	The Bill addresses difficult issues that represent some of the most important ones facing our country. I entirely acknowledge that legislation alone will not be enough to protect our people, but it is vital that we have sufficient powers to intervene early to disrupt terrorism, to prosecute terrorists and bring them to justice. That is what the Bill is all about. It is about ensuring that we have on our statute book the legislation necessary to meet the ever-changing and ever-evolving threat of international terrorism that we face.
	We are desperately trying to strike the right balance. We must have a society in which we respect the rule of law. There will always be tension between our rights as individuals and the rights of the community. I was in the Library quite late last night, after a lengthy debate on another Bill, and I thought about how people have dealt with those tensions over the years. Those tensions—over securing the balance between security and liberty —are nothing new. It was John Stuart Mill who, more than 100 years ago, effectively summed up that tension and the balance that we are trying to strike today, when he said:
	"All that makes existence valuable to anyone depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people".
	That is the balance that must be struck: in exercising our freedoms, it is sometimes necessary to restrain other people's freedoms. Tonight, we are focused on getting the right balance. I look forward with great anticipation—and, dare I say, pleasure—to the Committee stage of the Bill on the Floor of the House, during which we can further explore some of the complex and challenging issues.
	I am absolutely convinced that, on the Labour Benches, we want legislation that is practical, workable, effective and will protect the people of this country from the undoubted terrorist threat that we face. I think that the first responsibility of any Government is to protect their citizens while, at the same time, safeguarding the fundamental freedoms that make our democracy one under which people want to live and bring up their families. I am determined that that is what we will do. I commend the Bill to the House.

The House divided: Ayes 472, Noes 94.

Gavin Strang: I am grateful for the opportunity to draw the attention of the House to the urgent need for international action to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
	Back in 1963, US President John F. Kennedy stated that he saw the possibility of 15, 20 or 25 nations having nuclear weapons in the 1970s. Quite a few present Members of the House will not be old enough to remember John Kennedy, but I am, and I remember the widespread appreciation at that time of the importance of preventing more and more states from acquiring nuclear weapons. Clearly, the more states that have nuclear weapons, the more likely it is that they will be used. It was in that climate that the non-proliferation treaty was conceived, negotiated and agreed—a time when there was a very real prospect of a rapid escalation in the number of states with nuclear weapons.
	The nuclear non-proliferation treaty—the NPT—came into force in 1970. At that time the only countries with nuclear weapons were the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom. Since then, India and Pakistan have acquired and tested nuclear weapons, Israel is believed to have a nuclear weapons capability, and North Korea has stated that it has manufactured nuclear weapons. Every new state with nuclear weapons is a blow to international security, but without the NPT the world would have become a much more dangerous place much sooner.
	The Government rightly describe the NPT as the cornerstone of the international non-proliferation and disarmament regime. The NPT is built on three central pillars—first, preventing proliferation, by stopping new states acquiring nuclear weapons and stopping states that already have nuclear weapons acquiring more; secondly, obliging existing nuclear weapons states to disarm; and thirdly, enabling nuclear technology to be used peacefully. The treaty is essentially a deal between those countries with nuclear weapons and those without. The non-nuclear states pledge not to acquire nuclear weapons, in return for which they get peaceful uses of nuclear energy, plus the promise of disarmament from the nuclear weapons states.
	Nuclear technology and international politics do not stand still, so it is vital that the global regime for non-proliferation and disarmament can evolve and strengthen, in order to be fit for purpose. The NPT is therefore subject to a review conference every five years. There was such a conference in May this year, and one would have thought that if ever it was crucial that progress be made, it was at that 2005 review conference. After all, much had happened in the preceding five years.
	For the first time a state, North Korea, had announced that it was withdrawing from the treaty. Two states, Libya and North Korea, had announced that they had been working on their own secret nuclear weapons programmes, and North Korea then claimed that it had manufactured nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency had found undeclared uranium-enrichment activity in Iran, and the A.Q. Khan trafficking network had been exposed.
	In the meantime, non-nuclear weapons states were frustrated at the slow progress on disarmament , and the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 had thrown into alarmingly sharp relief the prospect of terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction. Despite those developments, the review conference was a dreadful failure. The participants succumbed to wrangles over procedure and the conference concluded with no substantive agreement at all.
	I raised the matter in the House in the summer Adjournment debate in July, and I was grateful for the reply that I received from the Government by way of a letter from my hon. Friend the Minister for Trade. He wrote that
	"a very small group of countries seemed determined from the outset to ensure that no substantive outcome was achieved, contrary to our wishes and to the wishes of the vast majority of States Parties attending".
	However, my hon. Friend was keen to assure me in his letter that it is not unheard of for NPT review conferences to be unsuccessful, and that there are other forums where progress could be made. He pointed to the forthcoming United Nations millennium review summit in New York in September.
	Hopes were indeed high for the millennium review summit. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had published a report entitled "In Larger Freedom" for decision at the summit by the world's leaders. The Secretary-General's report made key recommendations concerning all three pillars of the NPT. The G8 at Gleneagles issued a communiqué on non-proliferation, which welcomed the attention given to non-proliferation in the Secretary-General's report, and declared themselves ready to engage actively at the summit.
	The Minister responsible for international security, who I am pleased to see in his place, was quite right when he said a week before the summit that it
	"presents an opportunity to reaffirm strongly the international consensus against proliferation and to reiterate our support for all elements of the non-proliferation regime, including the NPT and to move the agenda forward. We need to do so now more than ever."
	The whole House should agree with that statement.
	At the summit itself, the Prime Minister said in his address that
	"The United Nations must strengthen its policy against non-proliferation; in particular, how to allow nations to develop civil nuclear power but not nuclear weapons."
	Of course, we had the statement by the head of the UK delegation to the NPT review conference, Ambassador John Freeman, on 5 May, which was also the date of the British general election. Speaking on behalf of the British Government to the diplomats in New York, he said:
	"we recognise that we have particular obligations, as a Nuclear Weapon State, under Article 6 of the Treaty. We re-affirm our unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the total elimination of nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament."
	But long before our Prime Minister got to his feet, it had become clear that no progress would be made. In fact, the sections of the Secretary-General's report on disarmament and non-proliferation had been removed entirely. I cannot exaggerate the disappointment that must have been felt worldwide by those who follow these issues.
	For their part, the UK Government have also expressed disappointment, and in the EU statement circulated at the world summit it was claimed that
	"the UK as EU Presidency was involved in the extensive efforts to broker agreement'
	on the key issues of non-proliferation and disarmament.
	If my hon. Friend could elaborate for us on what happened at the summit, I would be most grateful. Why was no progress made? Why were the sections of the Secretary-General's report dealing with disarmament and non-proliferation removed entirely? How was it that the international community once again
	"allowed posturing to get in the way of results",
	as Kofi Annan himself put it? I hope that my hon. Friend will take this opportunity to provide us with a full statement of what actually happened in New York last month.
	This summer on 7 July we had the London suicide bombings, and earlier this evening the House gave a Second Reading to the Terrorism Bill. There is rightly a focus on terrorism. At the same time, we must not lose sight of the fact that a nuclear weapon, even a small one, has the capacity to kill thousands of people. The growth of international terrorism makes the prospect of terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons an increasingly alarming one, and that is surely a reason why Governments should be striving harder for progress.
	When I had the good fortune to address the House before the summer recess, I took the opportunity to set out five proposals for progress: the universal adoption of the International Atomic Energy Agency's additional protocol; incentives for countries to forgo fuel cycle facilities; a fissile material cut-off treaty; entry into force of the comprehensive test ban treaty, which is still not in operation, as my hon. Friend the Minister knows better than I do; and disarmament. Disarmament is one of the three pillars of the NPT, and it is essential that progress is made on the elimination of all nuclear weapons as agreed by the NPT states, including the UK, at the review conference in 2000. That is what we signed up to.
	The current security climate has rightly led to calls for a tougher non-proliferation regime for non-nuclear weapons states. However, while we nuclear weapons states are perceived as disengaged from our side of the NPT deal, there is a danger that our insistence on non-proliferation will not carry adequate credibility with the non-nuclear states. In that context, I gently put it to my hon. Friend that a decision to replace Trident would further weaken the credibility of our case for stronger non-proliferation measures and would be seen as yet more evidence that the countries that had nuclear weapons at the start of the NPT are not prepared to deliver on their side of the bargain.
	It is not contentious to say that the nuclear non-proliferation treaty has made our world a safer place than it otherwise could have been. Equally, however, no one disputes the fact that the NPT regimes desperately need to be strengthened and urgently need to be updated. Will my hon. Friend set out as fully as he can the Government's view on why things went so badly wrong at the millennium summit as regards nuclear weapons? Will he also set out the work that the Government are doing to push matters forward in helping to get the world back on track on nuclear proliferation and disarmament?

Kim Howells: I say to him that the Government take the question seriously. Considering what we should do about the continuation and possession of a nuclear deterrent is a serious matter, which we shall tackle seriously. However, in this evening's debate, I should like to try to answer some of the questions posed by my right hon. Friend.
	My right hon. Friend asked whether the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. Kofi Annan, had edited or altered the form of words that might originally have been agreed for his speech. I am informed that the language of the treaty had been clear for some days, if not weeks, before Kofi Annan made his speech. It was Mr. Kofi Annan, no one else, who altered his speech, and there were no indications that he was under any pressure to do so. As far as I know, that is a very authoritative account of the procedure that occurred at that time, and I hope that my right hon. Friend will accept it. I have met Mr. Annan on several occasions, and he is certainly not someone who can easily be swayed when it comes to saying what he intends to say. He is a fine diplomat who is known for his integrity.
	While the review conference did not conclude with a substantive final document, there is general agreement that there was a lot of good, detailed discussion of ways in which the treaty could be strengthened. We hope that these ideas will be taken up actively in other forums. I take my right hon. Friend's point about the hopes that we had for the millennium summit as the most important of those forums, and I understand his disappointment with the review conference that preceded it and with the failure to agree a form of words.
	However, I am trying to answer my right hon. Friend's most important question, which is: where do we go from here? I would say to him that we must use whatever forum is available to take forward this hugely important problem. He told us that no single problem was more important than this one, and I am sure that we would all agree. How can we imagine a world in which people were trying to live after a nuclear holocaust? There would not be one. This is a problem that we have lived with all our lives, and I want my right hon. Friend to know that we intend to try to strengthen the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in whatever way we can, using whatever venue we can to pursue that aim.
	There were proposals at the review conference on measures to discourage withdrawal from the treaty. These drew widespread support, including from the European Union. The EU also played its part in setting out a progressive non-proliferation agenda through its agreement on and promotion of a forward-leaning common position on the non-proliferation treaty.
	Although our primary focus from a disarmament and non-proliferation perspective this year was, rightly, the NPT review conference, the disappointing outcome gave us added incentive to make strenuous efforts to remedy this at the UN world summit in September. That was why my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary agreed to take part in the initiative, promoted by his then Norwegian colleague, designed to generate broad support for a forward-looking non-proliferation agenda.
	Indeed, in the second week of the UN conference, I attended a meeting of the Norwegian group, and a great deal of passion was generated in the attempts of all the countries represented there to break through the dam of unwillingness to make progress on the language of the non-proliferation statement. I agree with my right hon. Friend that it was a great shame that we were unable to make progress there, despite the strength of that group. During our presidency of the European Union, we have also worked hard to secure European support for strong and meaningful commitments on non-proliferation and disarmament.
	Although it was again disappointing that the summit was unable to agree on commitments to disarmament and non-proliferation, I cannot entirely concur with my right hon. Friend's assessment that the summit was therefore a failure. The Norwegian initiative, in which we participated, obtained the support of more than 80 countries—more than was achieved by any other means. So I hope that my right hon. Friend does not feel entirely gloomy about this. There is a great feeling that we can take this issue forward. He will know, as I do, that there is a great deal of work to be done, especially with the non-aligned members, some of whom were very intransigent on the question of the language. There is room there to celebrate success for the cause of nuclear non-proliferation.
	As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has commented, if the reforms and commitments agreed at the summit are fully implemented, it will represent a major advance for the UN and the international community. The lack of an outcome on non-proliferation, regrettable though it is, should not detract from those real gains. Achieving full agreement on all the reforms put forward was always going to be very difficult. Rather than posturing getting in the way of results, that reflected the ambitious agenda and divergence of views between UN member states on many issues. The UK, in our presidency of the EU, worked to achieve the most extensive set of reforms possible, and we will continue to do so. Sadly, however, despite hard work by the UK in both its national and EU presidency capacities, pre-summit negotiations on non-proliferation issues proved very difficult.
	As my right hon. Friend said, that outcome was certainly a disappointment. But we should not be misled into believing that it heralds the collapse of the NPT—I do not believe that my right hon. Friend believes that, and I certainly do not. Nor does it mean the collapse of the non-proliferation regime more widely. We believe that the challenges to the regime have served to bolster support for it rather than to undermine it. We share that commitment with the overwhelming majority of states and we will continue to use all available international forums to build consensus to strengthen the regime.
	My right hon. Friend drew our attention to a number of valuable initiatives in this regard, many of which the UK wholeheartedly supports. For example, we are taking every opportunity to encourage all states to adopt the International Atomic Energy Agency's additional protocol, and are actively working with others to formulate appropriate incentives for countries to forgo fuel cycle facilities. Both have formed part of the activity of the G8 during the United Kingdom's presidency. And while we fully recognise the right of states that are in compliance with their obligations under the NPT to use and benefit from nuclear technology, as set out in article 4, it is clear that the nuclear fuel cycle presents particularly acute proliferation risks, which is why we have been promoting controls on the transfer of sensitive technology to be implemented in an objective and non-discriminatory manner.
	There are some very interesting proposals for fuel supply assurances, to establish either "real" or "virtual" banks of nuclear fuel, with some element of international involvement. I know that my right hon. Friend is very interested in some of those possibilities. It is far from straightforward, however, as one can see from the fact that Governments and experts have been trying to find a solution to this for some years. A number of complicated technical and political issues remain to be resolved, but I believe that there is now increasing international political will to reach an agreement on the way forward.
	The IAEA general conference last month demonstrated a particularly good spirit of co-operation and determination among states to strengthen non-proliferation and address other issues such as the peaceful use of nuclear technology. Those are very important building blocks. The UN First Committee, which is currently in session, the UN Security Council resolution 1540 committee and the G8 global partnership are all forums in which we are actively participating. I hope that my right hon. Friend will allow me to reassure him sincerely—
	The motion having been made after Seven o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. Deputy Speaker adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
	Adjourned at Four minutes past Eight o'clock.